


just as if you had been standing by

by leftofrevolution



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Drug Abuse, Force as Eldritch Horror, Force-Sensitive DJ, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-13 12:27:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13570578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftofrevolution/pseuds/leftofrevolution
Summary: It was really beginning to fuck with DJ’s head that apparently he wasn’t actually good at reading people, he just had psychic powers.





	1. Don't Join

He’d not had a great week. He’d only been willing to go to a hive like Canto Bight for a job to begin with, so that had been the start of it. Then it got worse, a two-day slice dragging into three after he was knocked flat for over a day with a blinding headache that he could only sleep through doped to the gills, and the delay—combined with the triple dose of ryll he’d needed to dull the knife being stabbed over and over into his brain—meant that his stash was empty by the time he was done. Then of course he was still in Canto Bight, the exact kind of glitzy sarlacc’s maw he explicitly avoided most of the time, and he wasn’t about to start going through withdrawal still within biting distance of its teeth if he could possibly help it. Which led him to make the stupid decision of trusting a local dealer without a reference.

He was pretty sure from the first hit that the dealer had cut his purple lotus with Deluge, but once the shit was in his system it was very difficult to get up the motivation to leave. Or think, really. Which was how he’d ended up in a jail cell in the first place, since usually he was smart enough to know he shouldn’t gamble. Mostly because he was too good at it.

It wasn’t that he got great cards (he didn’t), or that he counted them (borderline impossible with Sabacc anyway), or even that he cheated (his hands weren’t steady enough for the sleight of hand required). It was just that when he turned off the logical part of his brain, it was paradoxically pretty simple to figure out how a game was going to go. People, when you didn’t think on them too hard, were easy to read.

Which meant he didn’t lose unless he meant to, which would’ve been good long-term strategy survival-wise near the end if he could’ve managed to get up the motivation to give a shit. Which he couldn’t, since if he’d been that lucid he wouldn’t have gambled in the first place. Which meant that two hours in, he was up fifty million credits after starting with the loose change he’d found in his pockets, and that was when the police showed up.

Apparently the casino—who hadn’t much liked how he looked in the first place—had called them in on suspicion of him cheating. That was what he got for gambling against a house that catered to rich assholes; fifty million was nothing to a casino in Canto Bight, but it was bad optics to let their usual patrons lose to a man who hadn’t changed clothes or bathed since he’d arrived on planet (which, he’d meant to, alright? But it really had been a shit week). They couldn’t prove the cheating, since he hadn’t, but the cop took one look at his eyes and hauled him in for drug testing (which, bullshit, since he was actually one of the more sober people in the place).

Purple lotus was legal on Catonica, but Deluge wasn’t (seriously fuck that dealer). So while he’d started the evenly (un)pleasantly buzzed, he ended it with his inner ear convinced that the world was slowly tilting off its axis, exceedingly aware he hadn’t eaten since that morning (which didn’t help the nausea), and thrown into lockup with all of his winnings seized. Shoving his head into the nearest dark corner and sleeping until everything stopped spinning or he died just seemed sensible at that point.

\--*--

He hadn’t disliked the kids. Sure, they had woken him up before he’d completely slept off his hangover, and their self-righteousness was grating, but they reminded him a bit of loth-kittens, full of sharp points, big eyes and soft stomachs they didn’t yet know how to guard.

He especially liked their little droid friend, who at least seemed to know how dumb and easily avoidable their situation was and was only sticking it out due to loyalty (still not the best personality trait for survival purposes, but at least they knew it). Which was why he’d given in and gone back to get the kids in the first place.

That being said, DJ still made sure to commandeer the pleasure yacht of one of the rich assholes he’d bested who’d seemed to have been on the good stuff, so he was well on his way to curing himself of the dog that bit him through careful application of the hair of a better, more expensive dog by the time they tracked down Rose and Finn cornered on the edge of a cliff, about ten seconds from being arrested again.

After wasting their time trying to free all of the racetrack fathiers, of all things. They’d literally been on the planet for a little more than an hour and they’d fucked themselves twice. He’d taken twice as long for half the fucked, and he’d been blazed as shit. They didn’t even have that excuse.

He’d been tempted to leave them all over again, but Roundy had beeped at him plaintively and, well, they were already here, he guessed.

\--*--

He had known within two minutes of meeting them that they were going to fail.

Oh, not on this particular mission specifically; that gut feeling hadn’t kicked in, unfortunately, until after they had already boarded the _Supremacy_. But Rose, at least, was the type to throw herself under the wheels of whatever mechanism she had steeled herself against, and Finn was the type to allow himself to dragged along—not a romantic on his own but more than willing to follow the nearest bright star—and the Resistance… well. It was the type to love martyrs. They preached high-minded ideals of a different sort than the First Order, compassion and hope over order and stability, but when it got down to the wire, any faction big enough to constitute a real power in the galaxy loved the sound of the word _sacrifice_.

Rose was a mechanic, for fuck’s sake, and yet she sat there, shaking, handing over what was apparently the last keepsake she had of her sister—who’d died _yesterday_ , what the fuck—to a shithead like him. Finn at least was properly mad about it, but he didn’t actually stop her. They were both so _convinced_ this was necessary, that they’d give and give and give and somehow, in the end, it would all be worth it.

 _To who?_ DJ almost wanted to ask. _If you’ve given everything you care about to the Cause, what are you even giving for? What the fuck is going to be left?_

He didn’t ask; he’d asked before, of a hundred different Roses and Finns, the fragile cogs crushed under the weight of a machine they were convinced they were made for, as if they could be nothing by themselves.  They never had a good answer. The new blood didn’t even understand the question, most of them still having the people for whom they joined in the first place still by their side, were still convinced there was a happy ending for they and theirs, once the fighting was over. The veterans… well. They knew the fighting never ended at all—the Republic and Confederacy became the Rebellion and the Empire became the Resistance and the New Order, the faces changing but the words remaining the same. For them, just the memories of what they lost remained, and then not even that.  The Cause itself was the only constant, a sunk costs fallacy that went back generations.

So he didn’t ask. He made a perfunctory attempt to point out to the kiddos the futility of what they were doing—the system that was the war that chewed up both sides indiscriminately—because he _did_ like them. He did, but he knew it was pointless even before he began. They both had something in the Resistance they couldn’t bear to leave behind, not even to save themselves.

Also they were morons. They didn’t even like him, but they talked about the Resistance—about what they planned to do to evade the First Order—clearly within earshot with one of their friends via comm, and, well. Even if this mission didn’t kill them, idealism and overly trusting natures didn’t get you very far in the galaxy.

\--*--

Polstine was a little bit harder than his usual stuff. Usually he took enough spice to mute things a little bit, paper over the yawning abyss his brain went to when left alone with himself too long; no different than a million other junkies who used to blunt the edges in a galaxy too sharp and bright.

(The abyss was still _there_ , of course; he couldn’t always ignore it, the threads that stretched forever into nothingness, but at least the spice kept it a little distant.  If he still dreamed of people dying who he’d never met, at least he didn’t remember it come morning.)

Polstine was of a different tier entirely. Instead of the usual haze, the universe seemed… gray. Like the light had been sucked from it entirely, instead of just filtered through a pleasant fog.

It actually wasn’t the worst—it was hard to be too upset about anything, considering polstine’s euphoric properties—except for the fact that his usual instincts were fucked to the Pit and back, and they didn’t kick back in until after he started to come down a little. By which point he, Finn, and Rose were already walking through the corridors of the _Supremacy_ in First Order uniforms, and actually letting on that his heart rate had just doubled was the opposite of productive.

People didn’t listen to him about his (always, always, _always_ accurate) gut feelings even when they weren’t already halfway through executing an extremely time-sensitive plan with little chance of being able to just turn around and escape the way they came _anyway_ , so he swallowed his certainty that they were going to get _caught_ , that they needed to _leave_ , _now_ in favor of trying to figure out how to get out of this alive.

He knew what he was going to do before they even got to one of the doors Rose and Finn had brought him along to slice in the first place, except that he was unexpectedly feeling kind of shitty about it. Usually his instincts clued him in early enough that he disassociated before getting too attached to the bleeding hearts, except he had already saved Finn and Rose once, gotten _invested_ without the usual clamoring in the back of his head warning him away. He’s actually let himself hope for a little while that his first impression was wrong and they might make it out okay.

Because he was stupid as shit.

There was no surviving this. Not without making a choice that Finn and Rose, with their Cause, would never make. But DJ wasn’t here for a cause. DJ was doing this for a chance to look at some interesting First Order tech, a promise of getting paid by an organization everyone knew to be drastically underfunded, and because of a fond feeling or two for Roundy’s biting sarcasm, none of which was worth dying over.

Which didn’t help as much as it should’ve with the shitty feeling, the polstine’s euphoria long since worn off. Once he’d used Rose’s necklace as a conductor to help hotwire the door panel and handed it back to her, he couldn’t remember whether he’d always planned to do so or was just lying to himself about what amounted to an incredibly inadequate apology. The only benefit to being so distracted was that it completely sidelined his panic response, meaning he didn’t feel anything but a vague numbness when they entered their target—the room with the ingenious bit of tracking tech that allowed the First Order to follow the Resistance through hyperspace—and were immediately surrounded by Stormtroopers.

\--*--

The problem with believing in righteousness, DJ had come to realize, was that you came to believe it was _real_. Something tangible, something that could affect the galaxy.

Unfortunately, no amount of ideals could compensate for bad planning and bad luck, which was how Rose and Finn came to find themselves on their knees in the _Supremacy’s_ hangar while he bargained off to the side with General What’s-His-Name.

“Five million credits, an _Upsilon_ -class shuttle, and unobstructed passage off the _Supremacy_ , in exchange for the Resistance’s plans?” General… Hux, that was it, smirked at him where he was still standing in stun cuffs. “We’ve got them in our sights, and you’re a collaborator; why should I give you anything but a swift execution?”

It was a good façade, but DJ already knew how this was going to turn out, and it wasn’t with him on his knees next to Rose and Finn. “B-b-because you don’t. And you _know_ you don’t, because you don’t actually think that the Resistance would j-just fly along and let themselves be killed. So they’ve got a plan, and y-y-uh, need to know what it is, and I’m the only one who’ll tell you. So.”

Hux frowned at him, unable to deny this. “Two million, and you stay on board until your information is confirmed.”

DJ blinked at him slowly. “Five million, but I’ll stick around if you want. Not sure why you care, though. You’d know whether or not I’m lying to you before I even had hyperspace coordinates set. There would be p-p-plenty of time to shoot me.” He didn’t need the money—he routinely made more than five million off of a decent month’s work—but he knew very well what men like Hux thought of men like him, and he’d ironically be less prone to trusting information that DJ was willing to part with for the relatively small fee of getting the hell out of this alive.

Hux’s lip twitched. “That would be a waste of an _Upsilon-_ class shuttle.”

“Tractor beam, then. I’d still be in r-range.”

Hux’s lip twitched again. DJ couldn’t tell if Hux was trying to restrain a smile or a scowl. “You’ll stay on board, where we can shoot you in person. But should your information prove good, thief… you’ll get your five million.”

He wasn’t lying. So DJ told him, not feeling anything one way or another as he did. He’d always been good at compartmentalizing, and the guilt was pointless, anyway. It didn’t matter how clearly you saw things if no one ever listened. There was only ever one way this was gonna go.

\--*--

There may have been a twinge when he walked past Finn and Rose and Finn started screaming at him, but. Not much of one. Finn and Rose still had a pretty decent shot of surviving this; no one seemed to have noticed that the moving trash can following them around earlier was mysteriously absent, and Roundy was both good at improvising and had won three high-grade scramble keys off him in a game of dice on the flight over. As for the Resistance itself… well.

They’d lose this one, but they would have lost anyway. Ridiculous disparity in resources aside, DJ had heard enough about the First Order was run to know that Hux had something resembling a brain, and thus he would have eventually gotten suspicious of how easy things were being, and from there it was an easy logic leap to figure out that Crait was the only habitable planet in range for a bunch of non-hyperspace capable shuttles low on fuel. The only difference was that this way, the Resistance would die in space instead of getting starved out in a Rebellion-era bunker, and DJ would walk out of here with his returned bag of personal effects shoved into a pocket and his head still attached to his neck.

(He intended to spend his first few minutes in hyperspace hunting down and disabling whatever tracking device the First Order had inevitably installed on his new shuttle, except that he barely managed to engage the hyperdrive before collapsing into a ball on the ground. Everything was too bright, the universe was _screaming_ , and DJ had never understood the explanations most people gave for what was so alluring about different kinds of spice, because for him, nothing mattered so much as the fact that it made the screaming _stop_.)

\--*--

Once he injected his last remaining vial of polstine and gotten his brain settled, it hadn’t taken him more than half an hour to find the First Order tracking device and render it inoperative. That being said, he hadn’t bothered messing with the comm beyond spoofing it through several different layers of encryption, so he wasn’t surprised to get a holocall from a First Order channel one day less a month after their encounter on the _Supremacy_.

“I looked into you after our last meeting,” said Hux, which was pretty ominous for an opening line.

Still, he was far, far away, so DJ felt pretty comfortable leaning back in his chair and replying, “F-find anything good?”

“No,” said Hux. “In fact, I found nothing at all, which is curious considering that not only did I have a record made of you immediately after you left, but that record was also stored to an internal network. Yet less than seventy-two hours later, those data files—along with the files on the shuttle we gave you—were completely scrubbed from our systems, which is something I’ve been assured by our security experts is impossible.”

DJ shrugged, regretting his own thoroughness a little bit. He hated the idea of being found when he didn’t want to be, but the downside of not existing at all was that people who _knew_ you existed started to look for the holes. “W-well, you managed to call me now.”

 “Because I wrote down your comm channel on a piece of flimsiplast.” Hux’s lip twitched again; DJ was beginning to wonder if it was a nervous tick. “I want to hire you.”

The answer to that one was easy: “No thanks.”

Hux’s next expression was definitely a frown. “It should be a simple enough job-”

“No, thank you. General.”

Hux paused. “I can pay you ten million credits.”

“No one pays ten million credits for a simple j-j-job,” DJ pointed out.

“You refused me before you even knew how much I was offering,” Hux countered. His eyes narrowed. “I thought you a reasonable man. You seemed amenable before.”

“I don’t repeat clients,” DJ said, which was true. Doing work for the same people over and over again made things awkward pretty quick.

Hux paused again, before saying, slowly, “How do you think the war is going? Mister thief.”

Well that was a leading question if DJ had ever heard one.

“Seems like you’re winning,” said DJ, which was also true. If anything, it was an understatement. The First Order hadn’t announced a total victory after Crait, which implied at least _some_ of the Resistance got away, but by DJ’s estimates, the Resistance shuttles couldn’t have held more than five hundred people even before the First Order started picking them off, whereas the _Supremacy_ alone had crewed over 1.2 million. The _Supremacy_ may have now been in pieces (impossible to kill those rumors, considering the ship’s absence after Kylo Ren’s ascension to Supreme Leader), but most of the crew had survived, and that was _one ship_.

“The remnants of the Resistance are hiding like rats from a storm,” said Hux. “The New Republic is in tatters. Nothing remains to stop the First Order’s conquest of the galaxy.”

“… Congratulations,” said DJ.

“Thank you,” said Hux. “But my point is fairly simple: I have known men like you before. You like to straddle the line, to hide in the shadows made when the powers that might shine a light on you are distracted by greater concerns. And you’ve gotten away with it, until now; the fact that you have no loyalties has been offset by the fact that you have valuable skills.

“But that only works _when there is a line_. And there won’t be shadows for long.”

“… That sounds a b-b-bit like a threat, general,” said DJ.

“You’re berthed in Oridin City on Fondor,” said Hux.

DJ stared at Hux. Hux stared back. “Be at the following coordinates tomorrow at 0800 Coruscant time.” Hux stated a series of coordinates that DJ distantly recognized as being near the Core. Only once DJ nodded—a little delayed, probably a little jerky—did Hux smile. His face didn’t move quite right; it looked more like a baring of teeth. “I look forward to our renewed association.”

Then he signed off. It took a minute for DJ to unfreeze enough to stick his head between his knees, and then the next ten for him to stop hyperventilating. Well _shit_.

\--*--

The rendezvous Hux set was approximately twenty-nine hours in the future. It was twenty-two hours by hyperspace to get to the ordained coordinates from Fondor.

DJ spent the seven hours spare frantically searching the shuttle for a second tracking device and completely failing to find one. He then considered the possibility of selling the shuttle, something he really should have done to begin with except for the fact that he never considered Hux would spare two seconds to ever think about him again. Such a plan also wasn’t likely to work now anyway, if it ever would have; if Hux was able to pinpoint his location that exactly and cared enough to personally comm him, he almost certainly already had eyes on him. DJ wasn’t confident in his ability to slip surveillance that was likely ready and willing to either just stun him or shoot him outright, especially considering Fondor was First Order territory.

Which really only left one option. Except that it was terrible.

_Live Free. Don’t Join._

He had always lived by those words.

It hadn’t even been hard. He’d gotten good at his job young. No one could offer him enough money to tempt him. No one had ever _cared_ enough to actually make a play for him; he wasn’t that good, or rather, he’d never let it be known that he _was_ that good. Most of the shit he did that attracted any attention at all he made sure was attributed to slicers who would actually want the attention. He’d set up a self-learning algorithm _decades_ ago whose sole purpose was erasing the fact that he existed, and that had infiltrated most systems on the hard coding level to the point that it was included in master resets. It even had a built in time lag of several days so people wouldn’t notice while he was still physically present, as a precaution. He’s programmed it over the course of five days without sleeping (lesai did that) while stranded on a Corp Sec planet that was in lockdown due to a trade dispute. He’d then spent another week trying to piece together what the fuck he’d been doing for the past five days (lesai also sometimes did that, as it turned out). He still wasn’t sure of some of his coding choices, but it had done what it was supposed to, so good enough.

As a man whose number one desire was to stay off the grid, it had proven extremely useful. He burned through idents so quickly that the fact that the algorithm made it impossible to establish a presence anywhere that wasn’t deliberately code-shielded from said algorithm had never actually come up.

This was the first time it had come back to bite him in the ass.

But fine. Fine. He could do this. He needed to find out how Hux had tracked him down to begin with anyway. It was one job. Whatever. Once it was over, Hux had no reason to care about him one way or another, and even if he _did_ (because he would; if Hux knew men like him, he certainly knew men like Hux, and they never willingly let go of a leash), DJ would at least have bought more time to slip his collar.

This was just a stalling tactic. That was all.

\--*--

If he’d known exactly what he was getting into, he would’ve been so doped up on polstine upon arrival at the _Finalizer_ that he wouldn’t have been able to stand.

As it was, he’d gotten the bright idea that he wanted to be mostly clear-headed when meeting up with Hux again, to have his instincts sharp, so instead he was on a dose of refined andris low enough that he kept on seeing the threads shimmering out of the corner of his eye.

It didn’t even help; he was wound so tightly that he couldn’t distinguish the abyss at his feet from his own nerves from an actually useful sense of exactly how fucked he was going to be. When Hux came to personally meet him in the _Finalizer’s_ hangar, flanked on both sides by a Stormtrooper, DJ hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours and he’d cut himself shaving three times.

He somehow still looked better than Hux himself, who had bags under his eyes that proclaimed the time since he’d last slept himself better measured in days rather than hours and a band of bruises around his neck that hadn’t been discernable by holo. DJ wasn’t the only one to notice, though Hux didn’t get much further than raising an eyebrow and stating flatly, “I see you’ve bathed,” before things got… weird.

Because it was only a few seconds later that Supreme Leader Kylo Ren came running full speed into the hangar, skidding to a stop only once he was through the doors. The sound of his boots on the floor reverberated throughout the deck, but while Hux flinched only once Ren called out his name—a loud, commanding, “Hux!”, no title at all—DJ found himself wincing reflexively even before he’d fully turned to look at the opening doors.

He had seen Kylo Ren before, via the holonet. Younger guy, certainly prettier to look upon than Snoke had ever been. Never in person, though. He’d remember.

Looking at Kylo Ren _burned_.

\--*--

It had taken him a few days after detoxing from polstine to realize why colors had seemed so washed out while he was on it. It was a stupid but real truth of his universe that people exuded light. Not a lot, but constantly. A glimmering in his peripheral vision, dampened by spice (and stopped entirely by polstine, apparently) but exacerbated by exhaustion or stress. He hadn’t even realized this was unusual until he was around six years old, and he’d stood out enough for other reasons not to want to mention it after that.

Not that it was worth mentioning. Before, at worst it was faintly irritating, a migraine aura without the migraine, glitter made of stardust lightly dusting everyone’s skin.

Except Kylo Ren was not lightly dusted with anything. Looking at Kylo Ren was like looking into the heart of a sun.

\--*--

“Supreme Leader,” said Hux formally, snapping to attention upon Kylo Ren’s approach. “I wasn’t expecting-”

“There is a Force user on this ship,” said Ren, cutting Hux off. “I need you to make a list of each ship that has landed here within the past ten minutes and have them searched immediately-” and then he cut _himself_ off to stare at DJ, who was doing his best not to cringe but was very aware that he was failing. “Who are you.”

“Nobody,” said Hux, moving to stand into a parade rest the second Ren’s focus was off him. “He’s just a slicer I’ve employed-”

“No,” said Ren, interrupting Hux again. He took a step towards DJ and reached out a hand. “Who. _Are_. _You_.”

And _there_ was the migraine, the onset so quick that DJ found himself collapsed onto the deck before he even fully felt the pain in his head, on his knees in a First Order hangar just like he’d worked so hard to avoid just the month before. And fuck, Ren was even _harder_ to look at now, seeping starlight from his eyes, the threads gathering around his outstretched hand as he _pulled them from DJ’s skull_. DJ didn’t even understand what Ren was doing, but it _hurt_ , every bad moment he had ever lived yanked to the surface all at once in a rush of _fearpanicmiserydeathdeathDEATH_ , so it was with more instinctive desperation than any kind of skill that he reached out blindly, felt his hand touch on _something,_ and-

All of the several hundred people in the hangar either fell over unconscious onto the floor or started clutching at their heads and screaming, a dissonant wave of sound that did absolutely nothing for DJ’s migraine.

Hux, for his part, managed to grit out, “Ren… what are you… doing?” before curling in on himself, forehead pressed fiercely into his knees.

Ren himself stared around the hangar wide-eyed, seemingly unaffected by whatever the fuck was happening but also visibly startled by it, jumping slightly when one of Hux’s two Stormtroopers hit the deck with a clatter. This had the nice side effect of distracting Ren long enough for his hand to drop, the threads loosening from their tangle in his grip, but that proved cold comfort at best once Ren finished looking around. Ren’s eyes, if anything, glowed even brighter once they alighted back on DJ, and when _he_ bared his teeth, there was no pretense it was anything like a smile. “How interesting.” Only then, for the first time since he entered the hangar, did he bother addressing the Stormtroopers next to Hux. “Stun him.”

The Stormtrooper who hadn’t fallen unconscious pushed themselves upright unsteadily, taking a cautious step towards DJ as soon as they found their feet. He could feel them staring down at him where he knelt, still one knee on the deck. DJ couldn’t even stare back, his vision blown out from having dared look at Ren straight on for even a second, everything a smear of light.

He still had enough time to close his eyes as he heard the click of the Stormtrooper shifting the setting on their rifle before they shot him. Honestly, considering his day thus far, it was almost a relief.


	2. Kylo Ren

He woke up in a prison cell, which wasn’t a new experience. He was also manacled to the wall, which—okay, seemed a _bit_ like overkill, especially once he did a quick self-assessment and determined (a) the headache was mostly gone (good), (b) his vision was back (also good), but most importantly in this instance, (c) they had stripped him of his clothes and everything else he had on him in favor of a First Order prisoner’s uniform (which, in addition to being kind of disturbing, meant he didn’t have so much as a pair of lock picks on him; they’d even gotten his spare glued to the back of his teeth).

It was only once his self-assessment was done that he started paying attention to the faint voices out in the hall. He probably wouldn’t have heard them at all if he still didn’t have at least a bit of refined andris in his system, but andris provided a sensory enhancement, so while the cell had probably been designed to be effectively sound-proofed to human ears, he could just pick out the voices of Kylo Ren and General Hux talking outside of his cell door.

“… on the _Supremacy_ before the Resistance capital ship rammed us…”

“…possible… would have _felt_ it…”

“… around the same time Supreme Leader Snoke… distracted…”

“… must be the will of the… otherwise… the _girl_ …”

“… sure? … displayed no abilities…”

“… hangar… untrained…”

Then the voices stopped.

“… awake.”

And the door opened.

DJ knew enough this time to cover his eyes before Kylo Ren stepped through the door. It was a good call. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but the andris seemed near to wearing off; Ren had gone from a vision of a sun blurred through an insufficiently tinted viewport to an impossibly contained star field: a million individually discernable pinpricks of light. Easier to make out, but somehow even harder to look at.

On Ren’s part, he spent a few seconds lingering in the doorway before stepping inside and immediately closing the door behind him, leaving Hux out in the hall. And DJ chained to a wall alone in a room with the new Supreme Leader of the First Order.

Unsurprisingly, considering DJ had no idea what the fuck was going on, it was Ren who spoke first. “You’re bleeding.”

DJ blinked, still keeping his head turned so he didn’t need to look at Ren full on. “P-p-pretty sure I’m not.”

Ren’s lip quirked. “I meant psionically. You have been since you came onto my ship. It’s actually gotten significantly worse in the past hour.” He took a step further into the room.

“I wondered how your mental shields were so bad—even compared to a non-Force sensitive, they’re basically nonexistent—but once I took a look at you, it made sense.”

He took another step. DJ did his best to unobtrusively shove himself further against the wall, but there was no escaping the fact that Ren was now close enough to reach out and touch him. Ren, for his part, didn’t even seem to notice, his hand outstretched and hovering only a few centimeters from the tip of DJ’s nose. “Your mind is an open wound. You couldn’t build shields if you tried.” He shifted his weight forward, and there was nowhere for DJ to flinch as Ren cupped his jaw and looked him straight in the eye. “I wonder…”

\--*--

They were gone. They were _gone_ , they were never coming back, and now it was _dark_ and there would never be light there again, not _ever_ -

And he couldn’t stop _feeling_ it, every candle that flickered out, and it was just getting darker and darker and he couldn’t stop sobbing, no matter what his mum said or did, and more than anything else, his mum needed him to be _quiet_ -

And so she made sure he would be quiet, and so he was. Everything was dark, after that.

\--*--

“There was a hole torn open within you when you felt the destruction of Alderaan thirty-four years ago.” Ren’s voice held more than a tinge of awe. He still hadn’t let go of DJ’s face. “But because of what your mother did to you, you never got the chance to properly grieve. So it never healed. And it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse.”

“I d-don’t think you’re one to talk about f-f-families,” DJ ground out; he hadn’t been able to block Ren from taking a self-guided tour of his brain, but he wasn’t the only one bleeding, and Ren fairly dripped with it.

Ren’s grip on his jaw tightened. “Your mother was a junkie prostitute who drugged her own son into a stupor so he would stop irritating her clients with his crying. Her pimp was probably your father, but all he was concerned about was how you inherited your mother’s face.

“Are you aware that you have no cogent memories from between the ages of twelve and fourteen?”

“ _Shut up_.”

Most people, hearing the edge in DJ’s voice, would have had the sense to back up. Ren went on as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “You just… wake up on Nar Shaddaa, with no memory of how you got there. Except you know something happened, that you did something _terrible_.” At this point, Ren actually started _stroking his face_. “So you hide from you own abilities, even today, convinced that the universe as you see it when loaded under spice is the universe _as it should be_ , scared to see it as it actually is. Still convinced that what you see isn’t real, that there could not possibly be anything special about garbage born in the gutter. But it is, and you _are_.

“You’ve been purposefully dampening your connection to the Force for _decades_ , yet you still manage to regularly have accurate visions of the future. You must have been willfully blinding yourself to go this long without realizing you were Force sensitive.”

“M-m-most people don’t assume magic p-powers when they start seeing things other people can’t.” He could see Ren even through his eyelids now, which. Bad sign.

His eyes were still the most disturbing part. Like catching the attention of a sentient event horizon that wanted nothing more than to eat you alive. “The andris will be completely out of your system in less than a day. Shh, I know,” Ren said, and DJ realized that he was already beginning to shake a little, “I know how terrifying it must be: the opening of your mind to possibilities you didn’t even know existed.” What was nearly as disturbing was when Ren bared his teeth again, and DJ realized that it really was Ren’s best approximation of a smile. Kylo Ren was _happy_ , and he _still_ wouldn’t stop touching DJ’s face, thumb running along his jawline in a way that felt almost compulsive.

_But don’t worry. I won’t make you go through it alone._

DJ wondered if Ren knew how much that sounded like a threat.

\--*--

DJ had heard accounts from other people about what going through withdrawal was like. He himself switched his preferred narcotics around often enough that he more-or-less was constantly suffering at least _some_ of the effects, but he hadn’t been completely, stone-cold sober in nearly thirty years.

So he expected the nausea, the jitters, the way exhaustion washed over him in a wave without actually leading to restful sleep. Andris was relatively mild, all things considered, so the withdrawal symptoms were actually no worse than recovering from a bad cold.

It was just that everything was suddenly so _much_. Like watching a holofilm with the volume turned up to maximum, the lights super-saturated and over-bright, every scene playing on top of one another, a discordant overlay of clashing pictures and sounds. He was throwing up bile before the andris was even entirely gone, and after that the most he could manage was lying flat on the floor, the manacles chaining him to the wall allowing him just enough leeway to roll off the hard bench that made up his bed and press his cheek into the cold metal deck. There wasn’t even anything _in_ the room, just some harsh fluorescents overhead and a basic ‘fresher barely within reach, everything a dark matte gray that only dimly reflected the light, and even _that_ was nearly overwhelming, the fear and despair of everyone who had lain on the deck before him clawing into his brain.

The sound proofing was also still useless, since as far as DJ could tell it accomplished absolutely nothing.

There were nineteen thousand officers, fifty-five thousand enlisted, and eight thousand Stormtroopers on a typical _Resurgent_ -class Star Destroyer (yeah, he’d checked the stats once, what of it). Eighty-two thousand people, give or take, and every _single one of them_ was constantly _doing_ something, whether they knew it or not.

What was even worse was how it all fed into itself. Knots tying the Stormtroopers to the enlisted to the officers to Hux to Kylo Ren and back again, making it so he couldn’t even really tell any of it apart. He could _taste_ one of his guard’s boredom, out in the hall, and that has almost been restful—a steady, warm gray—until that same guard got into an argument with a passing crewman with whom he had a long-standing feud, and they just kept on reflecting emotions back at each other, irritation and anger and disdain and couldn’t they just fucking shut up for _two seconds-_

“They were incapable of speech for over three hours,” Ren said sometime later. “I assured Hux that kind of influence only works on the weak-minded, but he still insisted on stationing only security droids outside your room from now on.” Sitting on the floor on the other side of DJ’s cell, Kylo Ren sounded amused, relaxed in a way that seemed uncharacteristic. He had brought porridge with him, which now sat a few centimeters away from DJ’s right hand. Easy reach if DJ could rouse himself to move, which he couldn’t. “I think it concerns the general that the Force can be used to control people through six inches of soundproof durasteel.”

DJ had to cough twice before he managed, “N-not worried about me escaping, then?” He’d tried, sort of, before the andris had completely worn off. Unfortunately, they’d stripped him of everything he could’ve used to pick his cuffs, and there was no way to get to the door panel wiring from within a Star Destroyer prison cell without a plasma torch _anyway_ , so. It had been a short, depressing intellectual exercise.

“Escaping me would entail you knowing how to _use_ the Force, instead of just letting it use _you_. Which you can’t,” said Ren. “You have no conscious control over your abilities whatsoever.” He shifted his weight a little bit, probably because the deck was durasteel and not remotely comfortable for sitting on. “You’ve spent so long trying to destroy yourself that you don’t even know what to do with the pieces you have left.

“But I do.”

DJ didn’t lift his head from the floor. It was Ren’s fault he had a constant pulsing headache anyway. “N-not sure why you’d b-b-bother.”

“Because we’re connected.” Ren’s certainty reverberated throughout the room. “Nothing is a coincidence. I am looking to start an order free of the shackles of the past. And you… it was rare for even a Jedi _Master_ to have your kind of sensory abilities. To be able to consistently see the future as you do, to feel the movement of the universe around you, to _touch_ it… you are very nearly a living conduit of the unifying Force. One that could be _channeled_ , to create something new. Something greater than anything that has come before.

“But for that, you need to be able to concentrate on what is truly important, and your mind is so open that you’re letting _everything_ in.

“I can help you.”

He sounded so _sincere_.

Too bad he was full of shit.

“Y-y-you wanna help me?” DJ said. He pushed himself laboriously into a sit, thinking to look Ren in the face as he made his point before remembering nope, not happening, and ended up staring at a point about half a meter above Ren’s head instead. “You had me shot, stripped, and _chained to a f-fucking wall_.” He tapped his wrist on the deck pointedly, the cuff making a dull _clank_. “This how you make all your friends?”

That last might have been pushing it a little bit.

There was a pause. “What would you do, if I let you go?” asked Ren softly. There was not a hint of the anger DJ had half expected; instead there was something serene, and much, much harder to look at. “Do you really think you can escape this?

“You can feel it, can’t you? How the Force wanted you here? Your perfect intuition didn’t fail you this time by chance. You’ve avoided it for so long, tried to drown it out. But the will of the Force is unrelenting, and it is _everywhere_. And it doesn’t ever let go of its chosen sons.” Kylo Ren leaned forward. “It will control you like a puppet, should you let it.”

When this didn’t immediately get the desired reaction, Ren narrowed his eyes. “That doesn’t scare you? I guess I should have expected you not to understand. But if you aren’t afraid of _that_ , you should at least be able to recognize that Force sensitivity without training makes you an easy target.”

“F-for people like you,” DJ hissed. He felt stupid even as he said it, but being in the same room as Ren had never not been painful; the moment Ren walked in, something built up in the air, a pressure change that pressed at DJ’s temples and just kept on getting worse the longer Ren stuck around. Considering the past fifteen minutes was the longest DJ had ever spent in Ren’s company, he would have scooped out his own brain with a spoon if it would’ve relieved even a fraction of his headache.

Ren seemed to feel it too, though for him it seemed to manifest a little differently, a brightening around him that grew more and more manic the longer DJ spent flinching away. “Yes. People like me.” A thread in the air between them pulled taut, and DJ was unable to suppress a yelp as he was yanked away from the wall, cringing preemptively at anticipated shoulder dislocation before he realized that Ren had also simultaneously broken off the cuffs.

Which still left him on his knees less than a meter away from Kylo Ren, again. For all that Ren was kneeling this time too, considering how every single interaction with the man in the past week had gone, DJ would have and had felt less vulnerable completely naked with a blaster pointed at his head. “Hey, l-l-look-”

“There is worse than me,” said Ren.

DJ stared at him—unable _not_ to now, considering how Ren was holding him in place—and- well, the thing was, DJ was actually normally pretty good at keeping his mouth shut, but between the headache and the withdrawal and the fact that keeping his mouth shut had done absolutely nothing for him lately and was currently completely pointless considering Kylo Ren could read his fucking mind, he didn’t really try to stop himself from saying, “Do we really have to-”

“I had you shot. I had you imprisoned here. I will not allow you to go back to your spice, and I will not be letting you leave,” said Ren. “I know. So I want you to think about what’s out there when I tell you _there is worse than me_.”

Then Ren grabbed his face and

\--*--

Look. Everything in the universe was connected. Which sounded like spiritual bullshit except for the fact that it was literally true; it was just that most people couldn’t see it.

Which was good, because who the hell would want to. _DJ_ certainly didn’t, because most of the universe was _fucked up_. It was one thing to sit in dive bars and listen to old spacers complain about how nothing ever changed and each side was as bad as the other, another to _know_ that, for a fact. That people did the most horrible, pointless shit to each other because of lines they drew in the dirt, as if their belief was enough to reorder the universe into _good_ and _bad_ , a balance they could keep by killing enough of the bad people to offset the deaths of the good ones.

(It wasn’t, by the way. In case anyone was wondering. Every death snuffed out a light, no matter the uniform worn by the poor SOB who bit it.)

DJ didn’t like thinking about it. DJ regularly spent thousands of credits trying not to think about it, had not once in his life even felt the temptation to do more than take a sideways glance into the infinite no matter how much it threw himself into his face. Even now, two days sober, he was doing better than he might have been, hunger and discomfort and pure spite keeping him grounded at least within the confines of the _Finalizer_.

Except just doing that had taken everything he had, so he couldn’t do much to stop it when Ren dragged him over the edge.

\--*--

Something else nobody seemed to understand: The darkness wasn’t the scary part.

The darkness was _depressing_ , sure; it was nothing, and sometimes something had been there before. But at the moment it was literally nothing.

DJ had never been afraid of the abyss; he had been afraid of what was in it.

He had been right to be.

(Hux hadn’t been completely inaccurate when he’d said DJ had gotten as far as he had by hiding in the shadows. It was just Hux had misunderstood what DJ had been hiding from.

He had avoided looking too hard for a reason. The problem with being able to see everything was that everything could now see _him_.)

\--*--

“You absolute motherfucker!” DJ only got one punch in before Ren threw him back across the room, but smashing his head into a wall wasn’t enough to stop him swearing. “Sithspawn! Di’kut! Grakh k-kane a-“

“One of them would have seen you eventually.” Ren wiped at his nose, looking surprised to see blood.

“They h-hadn’t until _now_ ,” DJ spit at him. He was shuddering as bad as he had during detox, unable to shake the vision of a star—a thousand, a _million_ times bigger than Ren—that had turned and _looked_ at him. It had easily been thousands of parsecs away, yet it had seemed to think nothing of reaching out, to try and _touch_ him before Ren shoved him back into his body.

It wasn’t because it wanted to eat him; shit, it still felt like half the time _Ren_ wanted to eat him, and here he was cursing at the guy. It was that it wanted something _else_ , and his mind kept on freezing up every time he tried to even start to comprehend what the fuck that was, except he _couldn’t stop thinking about it_ , and-

“Calm down,” said Ren.

“F-f-fuck y-you,” said DJ, wrapping his arms around himself. “W-what the fuck was _that_?”

“A presence,” said Ren; he was still crouched by the door. “I had a hard time looking at it too, the first time. But don’t worry; it’s territorial, but it doesn’t move. Don’t let your mind wander too close, and it won’t come for you.”

DJ got halfway through a sarcastic, “W-well that’s-”

“But others will.” Ren paused for a moment. “The Force is an ocean. And you have been bleeding into the water for a long time. They know you’re there now, if they didn’t already.

“They will ask things of you. And you will give them. If you don’t, they will take them. If you are very, very lucky, what they take is something you can afford to lose.”

“Speaking from p-personal experience?” said DJ.

“No,” said Ren. “Right now I’m speaking from your experience. Your personal creed doesn’t make sense in a galaxy where there are beings that can do _this_ ,” and Ren’s fingers slid along the threads before grabbing at one in particular, and DJ had only a second for the horror of what Ren was doing to register before it was buried by _want_.

 _Come here_ , said Ren, and of course he did, how could he ever do anything else, and this time he knelt willingly less than half a meter from Ren, waiting, and when Ren reached out to touch him, he leaned into it with a sigh of relief, because he had done as Ren asked of him, and it was everything-

 _It doesn’t even hurt, does it_ , said Ren, and DJ shook his head, a little confused at the jealousy coming from Ren. _This is almost kind_. He was running his thumb along DJ’s jawline again. It felt nice; it had been a long time since DJ had been touched by someone who wasn’t trying to hurt him. _I could break you in days, and you would love me for it._

DJ closed his eyes, not disagreeing.

 _It always hurt, for me_. And then Ren… let him go.

The simple-minded contentment didn’t leave him all at once, which was probably the only reason DJ didn’t immediately find himself sobbing in a fetal position in the corner. “The weak-minded, huh.”

Ren stared at him. “Even more than your _freedom_ ,” and Ren’s sneer was pretty impressive to look at, as if the very concept offended him, “the only thing you’ve ever cared about is survival. And you know that I control your fate. Are you surprised that you’ve already decided to do whatever I want?”

“… No.”

Some of the horror must have still shown itself on his face, because Ren fanned out his hands, as if seeing that he was unarmed would somehow cause DJ to relax. “That was just a demonstration. I told you; you were very lucky. I want to make something more of you, not tear you apart more than you have already done to yourself.

“I have enough mindless dolls,” and DJ couldn’t tell if it was his own horror reflecting back at him or Ren’s alone, a vision of a dozen blank, staring eyes, before Ren scowled and blocked himself off before pushing himself to his feet. He stopped before he opened the door.

“You could probably escape me, eventually, if you wanted. I can’t be around all of the time. And then you would have your coveted freedom again… at least for a little while.”

\--*--

DJ was moved to actual quarters the next day, sequestered off in Ren’s corridor of the officers’ wing. He didn’t try to leave, every dream consumed by inescapable starlight.

(The first thing he asked Ren to teach him was shielding, but Ren just shook his head. _You can’t. Not with an injury like that, and it’s too old to heal now._

 _Then what am I supposed to do?_ he asked.

 _Learn to make anyone who enters your mind regret it,_ said Ren, and his eyes reflected nothing but blood.)


	3. Hux

“I wanted to ask you something.”

He hadn’t seen Hux since the hangar. Not that he’d _expected_ to see Hux—Hux had no reason to be in this corridor of the officers’ wing, Kylo Ren’s claimed territory, and probably only dared because Ren had actually left the _Finalizer_ for the first time since DJ had come on board—but considering how he’d freaked out about the guy after being commed on Fondor, it was kind of funny that seeing him now was almost a welcome relief. Though probably not very surprising; considering his sole company for the past few weeks had been a medical droid and Kylo Ren, a good old fashioned sociopath seemed restful in comparison. “Y-yeah?”

Unlike Ren, Hux didn’t lower himself to sitting on the floor, instead standing with his arms folded just inside the doorway. “I want you to tell me about the Force.” He looked even worse than the last time DJ had seen him, which was morbidly impressive. DJ hadn’t seen such a hollow stare on anyone who wasn’t drugged into a stupor or straight out of Ren’s brain.

DJ, who _was_ sitting on the floor, and probably also didn’t look his best considering the arc of his life since arriving on the _Finalizer_ , briefly considered craning his neck to look at Hux before deciding to stare at the ceiling instead. It wasn’t like he was going to earn any points here through social graces anyway.

Also… looking at people was _weird_ now.

It was definitely, completely, one hundred percent worse with Kylo Ren. But it was uncomfortable in a different way with someone like Hux, with strings that fluttered unattended just centimeters from DJ’s fingertips. Just the thought of touching them made DJ’s skin crawl, so he kept his hands shoved between his knees, trying not to twitch. “Ask your Supreme Leader. It’s not like I know w-w-what’s going on.”

It was quiet for a second before Hux said, “He won’t tell me,” and somehow Hux managed to pack in disgust and irritation and fear all into that at once, except DJ quickly realized that Hux hadn’t, in fact, that his tone was actually studiously even, that Hux didn’t sound like anything, he just _was_. “He said that a non-Force user couldn’t possibly understand.” Outrage, this time, though overshadowed immediately by more fear, an almost mindless panic that took Hux a second to shove back.

It was really beginning to fuck with DJ’s head that apparently he wasn’t actually good at reading people, he just had psychic powers. So he maybe sounded a little bit more flat than Hux’s line of questioning really deserved when he replied, “S-so you’re asking me.”

“I felt you might be sympathetic to someone wanting to understand the workings of our Supreme Leader.”

 _Not mine_ , DJ nearly said, except he was sitting in officer quarters on the First Order’s flagship, wearing First Order-provided clothes, and Kylo Ren had spent four hours with him every day for over two weeks trying to show him the ‘majesty of the Force’ (and failing, because there was no such thing, but the effort was there). The protest sounded pretty empty even in DJ’s thoughts. In the end, he just said, “Tell me how you found me on Fondor, and I’ll t-tell you what I know.”

Hux hesitated, but finally landed on, “No.”

“So it wasn’t something obvious that I m-m-missed, then,” said DJ, feeling at least a little comforted by this. It would have been dumb if in the end he’d been screwed by his own blatant stupidity. “Couldn’t’ve been the shuttle; I scrambled all of the c-codes, destroyed the one tracker big enough to be hardened, and EMP-wiped the interior and ex-ex- the outside. Not the box of credits, either; I laundered all of that the first time I was on-planet, and that wasn’t Fondor. Burned the uniform…”

Hux wasn’t saying anything, but he wasn’t leaving, either, and the longer DJ rattled on, the more pleased with himself Hux became. So DJ thought for a moment, then said, “You’re an engineering type. Focused on weapons d-design, but you know what you’re doing with tracking tech too. The hyperspace tracker had your fingerprints all over it. Sh-shitty programming, but the hardware was s-s-sound.”

That instantly wiped all smugness from Hux’s mood. “How would you know.”

He’d bought the schematics off a black market information broker less than a week after leaving the _Supremacy_ using some of the money Hux had paid him for the Resistance’s plans, but Hux didn’t need to know that the tech had already leaked, so DJ just ignored the question entirely in favor of thinking some more. Even the smallest tracker would have been caught by his EMP wipe unless it had been hardened, and a small tracker _couldn’t_ be; there wasn’t the hardware space.

Except the pulse waveforms of EMP cleaners were specifically designed to be blocked by flesh, since interior cyberware was usually so delicate.

Fuck, he _was_ stupid. “H-how’d you get a working tracker less than half a m-m-millimeter in diameter?” Hux didn’t shift, but the very way he stilled told DJ he was right. He couldn’t help but feel a little admiring; he hadn’t heard of a working tracker smaller than five millimeters. Even if the engineering principles translated on that kind of scale—which, DJ wasn’t a hardware guy, but he was pretty sure they didn’t—the range had to be terrible. It couldn’t have been more than two hundred meters with that size of antennae, and the miniaturization of the battery couldn’t have been good for more than a few dozen pulses. That should have meant the battery wore out almost immediately, unless “You had it p-programmed to go off whenever I left First Order shuttle standard gravity.” And not only was Fondor the first Order-run planet he’d touched down on, but Hux had contacted him less than ten minutes after landing. DJ sighed and closed his eyes. In retrospect, the timing had been suspicious. “Should never have gone near a First Order port authority, I g-guess.”

The information didn’t even help him now; he’d injected the tracker into his own bloodstream when he’d shot up with the last of the polstine, and an EMP cleaner designed to bypass normal safety protocols would probably fuck him up pretty good. He could hope to wear the tracker out, but he didn’t actually know for how long it’d function; for all he knew, Hux had figured out battery miniaturization to match, and DJ now had a tag on him that would last him the rest of his life.

Hux continued not to say anything or move for nearly a minute, before he said, “I cannot tell if you’re actually intelligent, or if you’re…”

Here Hux stumbled, so DJ finished for him, “Using the Force?”

Hux nodded, tersely. DJ just shrugged. “F-fuck if I know.” Ren’s refusal to teach him shielding meant his borders stayed about as impermeable as a sieve; it was less of a problem with Ren, who shielded himself, but even DJ’s thoughts weren’t his own anymore, his mind more than once catching the overflow of people passing by. “I t-t-told you I’m a b-bad person to ask about this stuff.”

“And yet you can understand why you are the person I am coming to,” said Hux. He seemed less bothered by DJ working through his little trick than DJ had expected. Not in a way that DJ thought he’d been completely off-base, just… well. He guessed it made sense. Hux was proud of himself, of his work, but from what little DJ’d gleaned from Hux’s relationship with Kylo Ren—and from what he knew of Ren himself—there probably wasn’t a lot of praise to go around even for revolutionary miniaturization development.

DJ was tempted to blow Hux off anyway, since Hux hadn’t actually told him shit, but, well. Hux maybe wasn’t the only one who wanted someone to talk to. Wasn’t like it was easy to get anything like real conversation out of Kylo Ren. “Wh-what d’you wanna know, exactly?”

It was only then that Hux took a step into the room, as if not sure before of his welcome. He hesitated for a moment by the desk before sinking into the chair. “What is the Force? Don’t look at me like that,” which, in DJ’s defense, he wasn’t, since he still wasn’t looking at Hux at all, just kind of at the wall behind him, “I’ve read the available literature. It’s an energy field that connects everything. But that doesn’t really tell me anything I can use.”

“… Ren called it an ocean, once.”

Hux looked nonplussed. “Is it?”

“M-maybe. But to me, it’s… h-have you heard of the energy spiders on Kessel?”

Hux nodded warily. “They spin glowing webs. Anything caught in them can have their life sucked out.”

“Y-yeah. Now imagine their webs are everywhere. A-and, I mean _everywhere_. On the outside of the ship connecting it to the next planet over, between star s-systems. In here, even, b-between me and you.

“But only you can see it. A-and, once in a while… you see a spider stalking towards someone, but no matter how much you scream at them to hide, to at least _stop walking towards it_ , they don’t believe you. Th-th-they just think you’re crazy, talking about something that isn’t there. And then you watch the spider eat them alive, and-and-and all you can do is pray that the s-spider doesn’t eat you too, that if it sees you, it’s not hungry enough to do more than t-toy with you before it moves on. B-b-because you’ve been caught in their webs too, since you were b-born. And there’s nowhere to run where they won’t find you, because the webs reach on f-forever.”

He had thought about this a lot; too much, really, but somehow not enough that just imagining it still didn’t make him cold. Even Hux looked unnerved, though his voice was droll as he said, “Are you a spider in this scenario?”

DJ briefly envisioned pulling on the threads between him and Hux, as Ren had done with him. Ren had been right, after all; in a galaxy where someone could make you think and feel whatever they wanted with a mere flick of their fingers, freedom was a lie, the illusion of it a condescension allowed by the powerful to the powerless.

Except just the thought of doing something like that to anyone, even someone like Hux, made him a little sick.

\--*--

Ren _had_ been teaching him, sort of. Except what Ren wanted him most to learn, DJ didn’t want to know, so the training had stalled.

It had been fine at first, or at least as fine as it could be. Once Ren had showed him the trick of it—how to exert Force on objects around him through their points of connection—even if he lacked Ren’s precision or strength, DJ could move lamps and chairs and weightlifting equipment around easily enough. Looking ahead to see how someone else’s action would go on to affect others only took effort in the sense of having to Force a narrowing of his focus, which was something he could really only do successfully for seconds at a time, but Ren said he was improving.

It was the other thing, what Ren called the other side of his ‘talent.’

 _Make him come to you_ , Ren had whispered to him as they stared through the one-way window into the hallway at the Stormtrooper walking past.

_It would be simple._

_You’ve done it before._

Those things were true.

But DJ didn’t want them to be, wanted that more than nearly _anything_ , like air, like breathing, like the universe wasn’t a place where someone could have that kind of power, much less someone like him. And so he had just stood there.

(He didn’t like remembering what happened next, but Ren had given up on pressing the issue since then. He wasn’t sure why, but he wasn’t about to question it either. Even knowing the lie of it, DJ found it hard to let go of the illusion of getting to choose what lines he would not cross.)

\--*--

So in the end he just looked at Hux, for the first time since Hux had walked in, and- did nothing. Hux hid it well, but the Force terrified him—almost as much as it terrified DJ, which probably spoke a lot to Hux’s personal experience—and even a simple Force trick was just likely to scare him. DJ had never found any satisfaction in scaring people. It just made him feel grubby afterwards, like a well-executed con or theft never did. “Not a good one.”

“Good enough for the Supreme Leader to pay personal attention to you,” Hux pointed out.

“Don’t think he has a lot of other options,” said DJ. “H-he doesn’t talk about other Force users much.”

“… They exist,” said Hux, reluctantly. “His Knights. I’ve… met them a few times.”

Hux was hiding something beneath his words, but DJ was too distracted by a memory of eyes to call him on it. “S-six of them?”

Hux’s eyes sharpened. “So he has discussed them with you.”

Ren hadn’t, but DJ didn’t want to disabuse Hux of the idea that this was a sanctioned conversation topic. “I d-didn’t know they were still around.”

“They are… of a sort.” Hux frowned. “I never heard them speak, after the first time. And their movements became…” Hux’s frown deepened as he failed to come up with a decent description, then held out his left hand demonstratively before causing the fingers to deliberately spasm in a jerking motion.

The movement had a disturbing similarity to someone miming making a puppet dance on the ends of its strings.

“Can the Force animate corpses?” asked Hux.

“Fuck,” said DJ, not really in response to Hux’s question, unable to forget the vision in Ren’s mind when he spoke of having _enough mindless dolls_.

“Is that a yes?” said Hux.

The occasional glimpse DJ got of Hux’s sense of humor sometimes made DJ think that he’d met Hux in an anonymous bar and hadn’t found out what a fascist prick the man was, he probably would have liked him. Hell, after a few drinks, he probably would have hit on him, because he was easy as shit for cutting sarcasm.

Not that Hux would have gone for it—the general had a sneer that spoke of useless things like _standards_ —except in this conversation about Force zombies Hux seemed all kinds of interested, all fear wiped from him in favor of an intense, not entirely intellectual curiosity, the hollowness at least temporarily gone from his eyes.

“… Probably,” said DJ, because the Force was that messed up, “But- I think those Knights are still alive, just not- people. N-not anymore.”

Which was arguably worse than Force zombies. By Hux’s recoil—more mental than physical, though he did lean back a bit in the chair—he certainly thought so. “I thought those mind control powers only worked on the weak.”

“D-depends on whether you care if the person you start with is the person you end with,” said DJ. Then he smiled at Hux, the expression blatantly false. “You f-feel on your way to understanding the workings of the Supreme Leader yet?”

\--*--

Hux left after that, which wasn’t surprising.

Hux returned a week later, which was.

\--*--

“You look terrible,” said DJ. He had been attempting to meditate, since he otherwise couldn’t really block out other people long enough to sleep properly. Unfortunately he wasn’t doing so great at gathering the necessary focus—turned out ninety percent of his concentration had been outsourced to drugs—so he had inadvertently started to doze instead and only startled awake when Hux bypassed his door controls again and walked into his bedroom, radiating an almost desperate energy.

Hux also actually did look terrible, swaying slightly on his feet, his cheekbones sharp like he’d dropped ten pounds in the past week he couldn’t afford to lose and fresh bruises ringing his neck, so DJ didn’t bother correcting himself even after opening his eyes.

“Why doesn’t he hurt you?” said Hux. It almost sounded like a response to DJ’s jibe, but it wasn’t. Hux was staring at him like he expected an actual answer.

DJ just squinted at Hux from his hard-earned lotus position on his bed. “H-he does.” DJ rotated his right hand slowly. “Broke my wrist yesterday.” DJ had finally snapped at Ren about how much his training was very much not helping, tired after nearly a month of night terrors that sometimes bled over into his waking hours.

Ren hadn’t appreciated it.

“He’s got a personal medical bay, is all.” Even if Ren had forced him to wait for six hours on his knees—cradling his fractured wrist the entire time—before allowing him to use it. DJ had gotten enough flashes of Ren’s own training to wonder if Ren just thought that was where students belonged.

“He’s done worse before.” Ren didn’t react well to being questioned or refused on a good day, and while DJ mostly tried to go along with whatever Ren wanted, it wasn’t always enough.

Hux glared at him. “You seem remarkably blasé.”

“I got beat up a lot as a kid.” And after, for that matter. Besides, he almost welcomed physical pain these days, the way it anchored him to his body; he liked what Ren did to his head a lot less, a constant reminder of _this is what I could make of you_.

It had only happened once, since the first time. Ren had even apologized afterwards, though DJ hardly heard it, curled up in a ball on the floor and retreated into gathering up what pieces of himself he could find.

(There hadn’t been a lot.)

Also… considering how little Ren seemed to think of entering his mind casually—never sparing a thought that DJ had any right to privacy from him at all—the apology had rung pretty hollow.

Some of his own exhaustion must have shone through, because Hux’s habitual glare receded a bit. “Even you hate him.”

It said something about their mutual paranoia how it was both of their first instinct to look around, though it wasn’t like they’d be having this conversation at all if Kylo Ren was currently on the _Finalizer_. DJ was aware he was grinning a little maniacally—sleep deprivation gave everything a weird tinge of humor—even as he said, “H-hating people takes a lot of work.”

“Snoke never seemed to have any difficulties with it. _He_ certainly doesn’t.”

If those two had been the grand total of Force users Hux had known, DJ supposed he understood why Hux was so twitchy around him. “M-maybe I’m just a shitty Force user.”

Hux sat down in the desk chair, leaning his weight forward. “Maybe you’re just sane.”

DJ nearly laughed in his face. “Not for long.”

Ren could talk all he wanted about making something more of him, but whatever disjointed gains he was getting through Ren’s training weren’t functioning well as replacements for what he lost.

(He remembered sitting in a warm kitchen as it rained outside, his mother walking him through kneading a loaf Arkanisian flatbread.

It was one of his happiest memories.

He had never been to Arkanis.)

“Could you kill him.”

…And there it was. DJ might have been surprised at the bluntness of Hux’s overture, except it wasn’t surprising at all. Hux was a survivor too, and he knew he had no time left for subtlety.

As far as seduction attempts went, though, it was pretty shitty. DJ could imagine what Hux might offer him, and it wasn’t anything he wanted.

Besides, he didn’t even have what Hux was asking for. “No.” Even disregarding Ren’s twenty years of Force training to DJ’s three weeks—even disregarding the fact that DJ _still needed him_ , that without Ren he wouldn’t last long, whether the spiders came for him or not—Ren knew him too well now, the best ways to crack him open. He could rip DJ to shreds in seconds, and it would be as easy for him as swatting a fly.

“ _Is_ there a way to kill him.”

DJ thought briefly about the polstine, the way it had grayed everything out. Except Ren was still a fucking psychic, and he would see an attempted poisoning from Hux coming from lightyears away. “N-not by you.”

Hux’s mouth thinned, his hand straying from his lap to trace the bruises around his neck. “He’s going to kill me soon.”

“P-probably,” DJ agreed, finally untwisting himself and stretching out his legs before him.

Hux’s fingers convulsed, pressing harshly into his own bruises. “Is the Force telling you that?”

DJ shrugged, neither confirming or denying it. “He doesn’t like you. He doesn’t respect what you do. And you piss h-him off all the time. D-don’t think it’s gonna be deliberate, but he sees no reason to be careful,” unlike with DJ, besides the once; even as his eyes seeped, Ren had been so deliberate with DJ’s wrist—with his ribs, with his fingers, one after the other—a slow increase in pressure until he felt the bones _crack_ , Ren’s hands on his face only ever a gentle counterpoint, “and he won’t regret it much afterwards.”

DJ wasn’t sure why he bothered adding, “You should leave.” It was, after all, a pointless waste of air. Hux was another martyr waiting to happen, another cog to be crushed under the great machine. Fuck, Hux had been _born_ to the machine, was practically made for it. And it showed; an engineering genius whose life’s work had culminated in the deaths of billions of sentients. Hell of a resume. Not someone _worth_ preserving, on the whole.

Except DJ was pretty sure he wasn’t the right person to be making those kinds of judgments, seeing as he was a selfish fuck whose existence probably hadn’t been a net gain for the universe either. And DJ really was selfish; he could see the threads running between them now, was conscious of them even when Hux was on the other side of the ship. It would hurt, when Hux died, and DJ was tired of hurting. And so he continued to look at Hux evenly as Hux’s eyes darted over his face, spread his hands open in an appeasing gesture when Hux took too long for his liking to reply. “You literally j-just tried to talk me into a plot to murder him. You r-really think he won’t find out?”

It was a logical argument, but those had never worked before.

Except for apparently now.

“How would I- where would I even go?”

“You st-still have my shuttle, don’t you? Just locked down?” Hux nodded tersely. “Well, it’s scrubbed, unless you’ve added another tracker. There’s one hundred fifty thousand credits underneath the third floor panel from the right, in a smuggling compartment. Unless your p-people have significantly stepped up your sensor arrays in the past six months, they wouldn’t have found it. The code to bypass the lockdown protocols is one nine eight seven seven five eight zero four three. You can start up my shuttle by singing the second stanza of ‘Dance, Dance, Little Ewok,’ except you need to replace the w-w-word ‘Ewok’ with ‘tooka.’ The code to bypass the hangar door security protocols is five six bee one alpha four gee delta nine nine nine tee three. The fuel reserves are at eighty percent. That gives you a hyperspace jump range of three hundred parsecs.

“You could go anywhere; it’d just have to be now, and you sure as fuck shouldn’t tell me where that is.”

Hux hadn’t bothered writing anything down, just kept his eyes on DJ’s face. Only when DJ finally stopped talking did he blink. “… You could have escaped at any time.”

DJ shook his head. “Your cell doors d-don’t have voice-activated overrides. And now, well…” DJ grinned, a little ruefully. “Don’t think there’s anywhere I could go that he wouldn’t find me.”

\--*--

Hux didn’t thank him. Hux just left.

Ren could have found out in five minutes what had happened when he arrived back on the _Finalizer_ the next day, except it never even occurred to him that DJ might have been involved. His rages were directed elsewhere.

DJ hadn’t even known he could affect anyone’s future but his own. It had never worked before.

He had actually used his abilities to save someone. Someone like Hux, sure, but a life stolen out from under the weight of the machine nonetheless.

Something useful had actually come of what he could do.

It… felt good.

He held on to that, as long as he could. That feeling. He had to.

It was his own actions, after all, that had left him completely alone with Ren.


	4. The Resistance

_I don’t sleep anymore_ , he told Ren, later. _I don’t know who I am when I wake up_.

 _It won’t be long_ , Ren said, his voice low and soothing. _I think she’s finally heard you. Once I’ve taken care of her, I can truly begin your training at last._

 _That sounds nice_ , he said, Ren’s vicious satisfaction rolling over him in a wave. He almost welcomed it, in a way. It was nice to have a change from what had become his new baseline of depressed apathy.

Only later did it occur to him that he had no idea who Ren was talking about.

\--*--

Ren had his own powers of foresight. It just so happened in this instance that he was off by more than day.

Ren wasn’t even on board—had left on some last minute trip to ‘prepare himself,’ whatever that meant—when the door to DJ’s bedroom hissed open to reveal Finn and some other guy clad in Stormtrooper armor.

DJ raised his hands in the air even as Finn swore and unholstered his blaster rifle, sighting DJ down the barrel. “You have _got_ to be kidding me.”

“Finn? Buddy?” said other guy, who a distant part of DJ’s mind registered as ridiculously good looking. “Mind telling me why you’re pointing a gun at the guy we’re here to rescue?”

Finn gestured harshly at DJ with his rifle. “This lying snake is the one who betrayed our position before Crait. He turned informant for the First Order to save his own skin. I bet he isn’t even a prisoner here, just-” then Finn’s eyes went wide and panicked. “Oh shit. This is a trap. Rey-”

Other guy grabbed Finn by the arm. “Finn, _relax_. Rey thought of that, remember? She’s off acting as a lure for Ren right now. He’s not even on this ship.”

“You’re still gonna get caught, though,” DJ interjected helpfully. He raised his hands a little higher when Finn swung back around the barrel of his rifle. “I’m just saying. Your d-diversion didn’t work.”

Hux may have been gone, but the _Finalizer’s_ captain wasn’t an incompetent. He had seen the manufactured explosion for what it was within seconds—though Ren’s warnings of an imminent Resistance incursion had probably helped—and was even now sending several squads of Stormtroopers headed towards the officers’ wing, cutting off the only escape route Finn and other guy had planned for.

DJ understood all of this within the thirty seconds since Finn had opened his door—he didn’t have much to do in his spare time except pay attention to the movements on the _Finalizer_ , and there were only so many working parts in an organization like the First Order where everything was so regimented. But he could see why it would be hard to understand his words in any context besides _yeah this is totally a trap and I am one hundred percent in on it_ , even other guy’s eyes narrowing at what DJ belatedly realized sounded a lot like a threat. “I think we’ll see about that, guy.”

“You d-do you,” said DJ.

Finn frowned at him, then his eyes brightened and he hissed hurriedly at other guy, “What if we-”

“If you t-try to cut through the back maintenance shafts to get around the Stormtroopers, they’ve gotten a barricade set up.”

Finn stared at him before turning to stare at other guy. Other guy licked his lips. “We could-”

“They’ve already changed all of the basic access c-codes since you got on board and set the door alarms to g-go off if you enter the old ones.”

Other guy’s eyes widened. “… Well that’s good to know.”

DJ let his hands drop as Finn and other guy turned away from him and whispered in what they probably thought were tones too low for him to hear. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, breathing out slowly. He never had figured out the meditation thing as a way to empty his mind, but the universe was eager enough to try and fill it anyway, whether it had to push out what was already there or not.

The Stormtroopers would arrive in force in the officers’ wing in less than two minutes. The entire ship was mobilized. They were systematically searching the newly arrived shuttles even now, would find the one helmed by Rose within fifteen minutes, even if Roundy had done a bang-up job on fixing their credentials-

Well fuck. Rose and Roundy were here.

Finn had been bad enough, really, but it was easy to smirk at the disgust in his eyes. Harder to forget the betrayal in Rose’s, even if at the time he’d been able to set it aside. After all, he had just done the only thing he could, to survive. There had been no question of saving them as well. He could have said anything, told them pointblank that they were walking into an ambush, and they never would have listened to scum like him.

There wasn’t even any reason for him to have tried. They hadn’t even liked him, certainly hadn’t _trusted_ him.

Except for the brief moment that Rose had, when he handed her back that keepsake of her sister’s.

And now they were here again, Finn and Rose and Roundy, here to save the day. Except this time it wasn’t on behalf of the Resistance’s flagship and several hundred of its soldiers; this time they were here for _him_ , even if they hadn’t known it.

(There wasn’t even anything to save. It was such a fucking waste.)

But just like last time, they were going to fail, except there would be no last-minute rescue by Roundy, thirty levels down and without the skill to bypass the _Finalizer’s_ alpha-grade socketguards that blocked them from remote door control. No other rescuers waiting in the wings, no lucky breaks in their future. Finn wouldn’t make it back to the hangar, and Rose and Roundy wouldn’t leave without him.

They were not going to make it out alive. All plans and last-minute ploys would land them nowhere except in front of a firing squad, or in an interrogation room for a few extra miserable days before being unceremoniously executed. Because even if Ren had been wrong about the timing, _he had known they were coming_. They had become snarled in Ren’s webs the moment they had stepped on board, every movement just catching them tighter and tighter, and they couldn’t even _see_ it, much less find the holes in the net.

But he could.

(This is what he got for allowing himself to grow fond of martyrs.)

\--*--

Finn was asking other guy for the third time if he could just shoot him when DJ opened his eyes. “They’ll be here in ninety seconds.”

“Thanks!” Finn spat at him angrily. “Got anything actually helpful to say?”

DJ stood up from the bed, though he stumbled a bit on the dismount and had to catch himself on the edge of the desk as the sudden elevation change caused his vision to gray a bit on the edges. Still, that didn’t stop him from yanking the rifle out of Finn’s hands when Finn started swinging it back around at him. “Let’s s-start with ‘don’t shoot me.’”

Other guy nearly followed suit with the gun pointing, before he seemed to realize that DJ wasn’t making any effort to aim Finn’s appropriated rifle back at them. “… Huh. Guess you really do have the Force.”

“The mind reading didn’t tip you off?” said DJ, walking towards the door. Finn made a valiant attempt to body block him before DJ tossed him back the rifle and stepped around Finn’s side as Finn momentarily froze, obviously not having expected DJ to have returned it. “Anyway,” said DJ, taking one look down the hallway to the right before turning left, stopping after a few paces when Finn and other guy completely failed to follow him. “You two c-c-coming or what?”

Finn scowled. “Why should we trust you?”

“Uh,” said DJ, and it was at that point that the top of the welded door at the other end of the hallway started glowing a bright orange, the Stormtroopers burning through it with an arc welder, “Lack of better options, I guess.”

“Good enough for me,” said other guy, and hurried after him.

Finn followed, though begrudgingly. “This end of the hallway is only Kylo Ren’s quarters. There isn’t even any way to access it without-”

DJ reached out and pulled sharply on a switch on the other side of the wall.

“ _Welcome_ ,” said a mechanical voice, and the doors to Ren’s rooms smoothly slid open.

Finn threw his hands up in the air. “Forget it. Never mind. I clearly have no idea what’s happening. Though if you’ve had freaking Force powers this entire time, then it really adds a whole new level of-”

“I d-didn’t,” said DJ, turning into the second room on the right as the doors closed behind them.

“Could you stop interrupting me?” snapped Finn. “I don’t care if you can see the future or read my mind or whatever, that’s rude!”

“… Okay,” said DJ, and ripped off the room’s interior panel before squatting down and holding out a hand to other guy. “Knife. Please,” he added, when other guy hesitated.

Other guy handed it over with a smirk. “That’s all I wanted. Finn’s right, can’t hurt to add a little civility to the galaxy.” He only started really looking around after DJ began systematically stripping the insulation off of the panel’s wiring. “… Is this a turbolift?”

“S-straight shot to the main hangar,” said DJ. He didn’t have the codes for it, and he was pretty sure it worked on voice recognition anyway, but there were ways around such things. He finally finished prepping the five wires he needed and looked over at Finn. “Could you k-kindly ask Roundy to patch in to the sound system and general records database, splice together the words ‘down’ and ‘level’ from the speech Kylo Ren gave to the _Finalizer_ crew two weeks b-b-b-ago, and project the sound clip through speaker… uh…” DJ did a quick mnemonic to remember the sound setup in the officers’ wing of an _Insurgent_ -class Star Destroyer, “Eff one three seven cee?”

Finn exhaled angrily and looked as if he was about to say something, before other guy said quickly, “On it,” and clicked on his comlink. “BB-8? Hey, buddy, got a quick job for you. Could you…” he trailed off before holding out the comlink at DJ, who leaned as far as he dared away from the panel and repeated himself. Other guy brought the comlink back up to his mouth and said, “You got that, buddy? Of course you do, great. How long do you think-”

“Down level,” said the voice of Kylo Ren, which was just enough warning for DJ to twist together three of the wires and pull the last two out of the wall. He burned his left hand pretty bad in the process—this kind of thing normally required gloves and a wire stripper as base level equipment for a reason—but the doors to the turbolift closed and the same mechanical voice from before said, “ _Descending to hangar_ ,” so he counted it as a victory anyway, grinning as he shook out his smoking fingers.

Other guy looked even more pleased, whooping into his comlink. “That was some fast work there, BB!” Only Finn’s expression remained solemn, and while he hadn’t pointed his rifle at DJ again, he hadn’t re-holstered it either.

“Poe, before we let this guy-” “Let me?” said DJ, though Finn just pointed a warning finger at him before continuing, “-anywhere _near_ our ticket out of here, we’d better get some questions answered.”

“N-no you don’t,” said DJ. “I’m not coming with you.”

Both Finn and apparently-Poe stared at him. “For real?” said Poe. “What, you’ve got your own way off this ship?”

“Like we’re about to-” began Finn, before DJ said, “I’m not leaving.”

“If you interrupt me one more time, I _am_ going to shoot you,” said Finn.

“You probably still shouldn’t,” said DJ. “Th-there’s still a squad of Stormtroopers b-b-between us and the shuttle hangar.”

“Can I just say how weird it is that you know stuff like that?” said Finn, just as the turbolift slowed and its doors slid open. DJ stepped out first, though Finn quickly bypassed him, stopping just at the turn and peering around the corner before taking a few steps back. “Jackass here wasn’t lying, there is a squad.”

Poe looked at DJ. “Don’t think our disguises will hold up considering how tight security is, especially with you along. There another way ‘round?”

DJ took an obvious glance around at the complete lack of other options. “N-not unless you want me f-fucking with the turbolift some more and a twenty minute detour,” said DJ. “Which you don’t. They’re gonna find your shuttle in less than ten.”

Finn’s lips thinned. “What’s the plan, then? They notice us, they’ll call it in and make the hangar a kill zone.”

Poe bit on his lower lip thoughtfully before looking at DJ again. “Couldn’t you…” he gestured out to the side with his left hand.

Both DJ and Finn stared at him. “What the hell does that mean?” said Finn.

“I dunno!” said Poe. “I just saw Luke Skywalker do it once when I was kid and the people looking for us just turned around and left.”

“You met Luke Skywalker?” said Finn.

“A long time ago,” said Poe. “He was awesome, but that’s beside the point.” He looked at DJ. “So could you…?” he made the hand gesture again.

“No,” lied DJ, “But I’ve got other tricks.” He stepped carefully up to the turn himself before placing a hand on the wall and closing his eyes. Stormtroopers just thirty meters down the corridor where it became an intersection. They needed to head right to get to the hangar; on the left… that’d work. “C-can I borrow your comlink?” Poe handed it to him wordlessly—which spoke to such a glaring lack of trust issues that it probably bordered on a personality flaw—and DJ clicked it on. “Heya.” Roundy beeped a query at him. “Y-yeah, it’s me.” Roundy warbled angrily. “Yeah, I know. You can zap me later. You still have that Kylo Ren speech queued up?” Roundy sulkily beeped an affirmative. “Play the first twenty seconds through speaker… shit, uh, eff one oh seven eye, will ya?” Roundy hummed, then dinged. “Great. Thanks.” He handed the comlink back to Poe.

“Why does literally everyone but me understand droids?” said Finn. He looked at Poe. “Is there a class I can take, or-?”

Down the corridor and to the left, a voice started yelling, muffled through a door. The Stormtroopers looked at each other, then the squad leader gestured, sending four of them to investigate while he and one other stared at the intersection. DJ waited five seconds before nodding at Finn and Poe. “T-time to go.”

The two Stormtroopers left in the corridor went down before they even turned around, both Finn and Poe proving to be decent shots with their appropriated rifles. DJ, for his part, sprinted right past them and to the now-closed door of the room that the remaining four Stormtroopers were investigating, ripped off the door panel, and hurriedly stripped two of the wires with the knife borrowed from Poe that he’d never bothered to return before twisting them together.

Just in time, too, as almost immediately he heard someone tap the door panel on the other side of the wall before swearing when the door didn’t open. “Shouldn’t we be hurrying?” asked Poe. “They’ve certainly noticed something’s up now, and as Finn said, they’re going to be calling it in.”

“No, they aren’t.” When Poe just stared at him, DJ shrugged. “I broke all the t-transponders in their comms.”

Poe stared him, then grinned. “You’re really a handy guy to have around, you know that?”

“Yeah, well, he was last time too until he screwed us all over,” said Finn. “Now let’s get going before they find Rose and BB-8.”

He turned down the right hallway without waiting for a reply, posting himself at the end and looking out into what DJ knew to be the hangar.

Poe frowned after Finn. “Sorry,” he said to DJ.

“Why?” asked DJ. “He’s right. I could betray you any second now.”

“Well, _yeah_ ,” said Poe, “But he could have been more polite about it.” When DJ just stared at him, Poe cracked another grin. “Civility, remember? Can’t be asking for it without giving it.” Then he jogged down the hallway after Finn.

DJ, for his part, turned and headed back to the turbolift.

He had only gotten so far as staring at the broken turbolift panel and trying to figure out if he could even make it work without jailbreaking one of the fallen Stormtrooper’s datapads when Finn and Poe came running back around the corner. “What the hell?” said Finn.

DJ stared at him blankly. “Oh, right.” The code he’d given to Hux would have been deleted from the system by the _Finalizer’s_ techs after he made his escape, but fortunately DJ never programmed in one backdoor when he could program in three. “The c-code you’ll need to bypass the hangar door security protocols is eight two eff zero delta nine jay epsilon one two three ex zero.”

“… What?” said Finn, though Poe had immediately gotten out a small datapad and was hurriedly jotting it down. “That’s not- what are you doing back here? We’re leaving! They’re gonna find Rose and BB-8 within less than six minutes!”

“I t-told you,” said DJ. “I’m not coming with you.”

“How can we even trust your code if you aren’t coming with us?” asked Finn. “You could have set it up to make an alarm go off the second we use it.”

“As o-opposed to the other three t-t-times I could’ve gotten you guys caught?”

“You wouldn’t have gotten Rose and BB-8 that way,” said Finn.

DJ pointed at Finn with the hand not currently holding the knife. “Clever. But wrong. They’re in the fifth shuttle f-from the left.”

“… Fuck,” said Finn, but he rallied quickly. “Well you’re still not staying here. I’m not going to go back to Rey and tell her that we failed because the guy we came to rescue didn’t want to come because… _why_ don’t you want to come? Ren isn’t going to be happy with you for helping us escape. That’s the kind of thing he kills people for.”

“Pr-pretty sure he’ll let m-me live,” said DJ.

“You might not like who you are when he’s done with you, though,” said Poe, who only then looked up from his datapad. He cocked his head at DJ. “Has he been in your head yet?” DJ didn’t say anything. “Yeah,” said Poe, quietly. “Sucks, doesn’t it. Bet it’d suck worse if he was _really_ pissed off. And you should know that he _hates_ Finn. Can’t imagine what kind of mood he’ll be in once he finds out my buddy here slipped through his fingers.”

“… I’ve got my reasons,” said DJ, and turned back to the turbolift panel.

At which point Finn shot him.


	5. Rey

“The way I figure it,” said Finn, sometime later, “You must’ve _wanted_ me to shoot you. ‘Cause you’ve got the Force. So the only way I could’ve possibly shot you is if you let me.”

“… That’s n-not how the Force works,” said DJ, a little blearily. In truth, he’d gotten about a second of warning before Finn actually shot him, which might have been enough to change things if Finn had been gripping his rifle a little less tightly, or if DJ hadn’t been distracted by the thought of slamming his head into the wall a few times just to keep himself awake, or if Finn had premeditated his actions at all and thus given him more than a measly second to think _well shit_.

But none of that had happened, and so he had woken up with his hands cuffed behind his back to the shuttle’s lone couch, half-remembering a dream of playing in the forest as a kid (he hadn’t seen a tree until he was sixteen) and fighting off a combination of wooziness and vertigo that spoke to Finn or Poe or Rose having found the shuttle’s medpac and then shooting him up with half a dose of the hypospray.

Or a full dose, maybe, because the planet visible from the viewport wasn’t one DJ recognized from the sector where the _Finalizer_ had been stationed.

 _Dantooine_ , flashed the room’s viewscreen.

… Make that definitely a full dose. Getting stunned didn’t knock you out for ten minutes, much less over three hours.

“Alright, Rey,” said Poe, audible only because the cockpit door was open, “There’s no sign of a tail. We’ll be landing at your position in just a minute.”

“… I really hope your base isn’t here,” said DJ.

“It isn’t,” said Rose from the doorway of the cockpit. She glared when DJ looked over at her. “Do you think we’re stupid?”

“If you were _smart_ ,” said DJ, “You would have left me on the _Finalizer_.”

Roundy, plugged into the shuttle’s charge port in the corner, burbled a question. (They had not, as threatened, zapped DJ, but DJ figured it was just a matter of time.)

“Ren can find me,” explained DJ. “Wherever. He got his hooks into my head weeks ago. It d-doesn’t matter where you t-take me. So unless you plan on wandering the galaxy forever and never stopping on-planet for more than an hour at a t-time for the rest of your lives, you should d-d-ditch me on Dantooine and go on your merry way.”

“Nah,” said Poe.

“Rey’ll take care of it,” said Finn.

DJ closed his eyes. “Okay. Question: who the f-fuck is Rey?”

There was a sudden silence.

“Do you seriously not know?” asked Finn. “‘Cause Ren is like- obsessed with her.”

“I really don’t,” said DJ, not able to muster the energy to come up with anything suitably sarcastic.

“Well, good timing then,” said Poe, the shuttle gently touching down in a field that contained nothing but an old Corellian light freighter, “Because you’re about to meet her.”

\--*--

Rey glowed, as it turned out. It actually looked quite nice.

The view did nothing to staunch the feeling that he was staring at the human version of a star about ten seconds away from going supernova, but he could at least appreciate that she was putting effort into not burning out his retinas in the meantime.

Though, still. This was weird.

 _Wow,_ said Rey, who shouldn’t have existed. _You are extremely messed up._

 _The sedative hasn’t completely worn off_ , said DJ. It wasn’t his fault he could barely stand. Having his hands cuffed behind his back didn’t help either; his balance was dicey enough as is.

 _That really doesn’t explain your brain_ , said Rey. She took a few steps towards him.

“I know we told you via comm, but I just wanted to emphasize this man is horrible and I’m glad Finn got to shoot him,” said Rose.

“Yes I know,” said Rey absently, not once taking her eyes off him. Then they narrowed. _Is **that** what you’ve done. You asshole._

 _Sorry?_ said DJ, who probably wasn’t as sorry as he should have been but at that moment was willing to put in the effort.

 _Not you_ , said Rey, then her hand darted out, so suddenly that it caused DJ to flinch, except she wasn’t reaching for him at all, snatching instead a bundle of threads out of the air. She stared at them for a brief second, wrapped tightly around her fingers, before sneering and- burning them to nothing.

DJ stared. _What._

 _That’ll help for now_ , said Rey, half to herself, before turning back to DJ. _You’re still really obvious, though._

 _Um,_ said DJ.

Rey stuck out her lower lip thoughtfully. _I wonder._ Then she _did_ touch him, but lightly; her right index finger on the center of his forehead. DJ nearly gained the wherewithal to ask her what she was doing before-

Everything went quiet. And dim. And still.

DJ hadn’t even known it could be like that. Not even the polstine had so completely muted the whispers.

He had never been truly alone before, in his own head.

(If he’d had any more energy, it might have been terrifying. As it was, all he felt was relief.)

He had nearly a full two seconds to appreciate it before the past six weeks caught up with him all at once. The only saving grace was that he went completely unconscious before he landed face first into the dirt.

\--*--

“I wasn’t actually expecting that to happen,” said Rey, the most beautiful person to have ever existed.

At least part of that was that she had brought him a full pot of caf when he woke up a full twenty-six hours later in a Resistance holding cell, but most of it was the fact that his head was still blissfully empty. “Uh-huh,” breathed DJ into his cup of caf. It didn’t even taste good, but there was something undeniably magical about sleeping really well and then drinking caf, especially considering Ren never allowed him any during the entirety of his month and a half on-board the _Finalizer_. Rey may have insisted he actually eat the nutrition bar first—something about how caf alone would make him throw up after over a day without food—but he could ignore that.

He could ignore a lot of things. Even the fact that he had found himself in a cell again for the third time in as many months had no impact whatsoever on his mood, and he _hated_ being locked up, historically.

“I’m not sorry though,” Rey continued. “It was necessary.”

“Okay,” said DJ agreeably.

“I _am_ glad Finn caught you before you hit your head,” Rey said.

“Mm-hm,” said DJ, taking another sip of the caf. It was bitter and terrible and glorious.

“But I have to figure out what to do next. I can’t keep on shielding both of us forever,” said Rey.

“… Oh,” said DJ.

Rey studied him. “You’re disappointed.”

“I h-haven’t slept in a while,” admitted DJ.

Rey’s face scrunched up thoughtfully. “The general was worried that if I stopped blocking you, you would try and contact Kylo Ren.”

DJ thought about it. “N-not on purpose.”

“No,” Rey agreed. “You _are_ an asshole, but you stayed with Ren because he scared you into believing you didn’t have a choice, not because you thought he was right about anything.

“That being said, you do sort of- bleed everywhere. _I_ noticed it after only a few weeks from halfway across the galaxy, and I didn’t even know you existed. What did Ren do to you?”

A lot of stuff, but that wasn’t what Rey was asking. “I’ve been like this for a long t-time.”

“He should have fixed it,” said Rey. “So it’s still his fault.”

DJ stilled, the cup of caf halfway to his mouth. “… Could you fix it?”

“What would you do if I did?” asked Rey.

“Leave,” said DJ. “You would n-never hear from m-me again.”

“Well that’s stupid,” said Rey.

DJ blinked. He’d meant the words to be reassuring, considering what Finn and Rose had to have told Rey about him. “Um.”

“Look,” said Rey. “Force sensitivity is _very_ rare. A planet was considered lucky if it produced a single Jedi, and that was when they had the ability to systematically scan for people with Force potential. You have a responsibility.”

“To _what_?” asked DJ.

“Well, to me,” said Rey. “If nothing else. I’ve only found three others since I started looking, and the eldest is ten. I can’t start a new Jedi Order with only children.”

“Why would you w-want to start a n-new Jedi Order?” asked DJ. He was actually pretty sure the question came out sounding innocuous, but he couldn’t completely suppress a shudder. He had heard stories of the Jedi along with everyone else. Thinking magical powers gave you claim to a higher morality didn’t end well.

Rey noticed, of course. “Don’t you think that people with power have a responsibility to help?”

“W-why do you think you’re the one to decide what _helps_?” asked DJ.

“Because the First Order is hurting innocent people,” said Rey.

“A war does that too,” said DJ.

“The First Order conscripts babies, has a human-first policy, and kidnaps and tortures people,” said Rey. “Do you think it’s _good_ that they currently have no challenge to their power in the galaxy?”

“I dunno,” said DJ. “The R-Resistance hasn’t put out a p-pamphlet for me to evaluate whether they’re a b-better alternative. _Not the First Order_ isn’t actually a w-working political system.”

“Yes, I know,” said Rey. “We had that, but they blew it up.”

“ _We_ did?” said DJ. He knew accents pretty well, and Rey’s wasn’t Core. “Where’re you f-from?”

Rey’s mouth thinned. “Jakku.”

“And h-how was the New Republic h-helping you out there?” said DJ.

“It wasn’t,” said Rey. “But the fact that _I_ had to fend for myself isn’t a reason for me not to help people now.”

“With a n-new Jedi Order,” said DJ, not bothering to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

“The Jedi were massive failures,” said Rey. “As was the New Republic. But the fact that they fell short doesn’t mean we can’t learn from what they did and improve upon it.”

“Uh-huh,” said DJ.

Rey studied him. “You’re very cynical.”

“H-how are you _not_?” asked DJ.

“Because I was alone for my entire life,” said Rey. “And then I found people who cared about me. And if I died tomorrow saving those I loved, it would be better than if I lived another fifty years but never found them at all.”

“Y-you can always find more people,” said DJ.

“And how’s that working out for you?” asked Rey.

DJ said nothing.

Rey waited for a few seconds, then took another nutrition bar out of her pocket, unwrapped it, and took off half of it in a bite. It was around a mouthful of granola that she said, “I can take a look at your brain, if you want.”

“Ren said the injury was t-too old to fix,” said DJ.

“The dark side is bad at healing,” said Rey, licking a few crumbs of granola off her fingers. “Also I don’t think he was trying very hard.”

“… Okay,” said DJ.

Rey was still blocking him off, as far as he could tell, but the air between them was still filled with _something_ as she nodded at him before wiping her hand off on her pants, reaching out across the table, and resting the tips of her fingers on his temples.

DJ nearly flinched—Ren had touched him like that, a few times—before Rey’s distinct _not-Ren-ness_ finally registered with his subconscious and he relaxed, a bit.

It was actually kind of comfortable. She wasn’t a lighter touch, exactly, but she was being careful, and she had _asked_ , which felt like it had to count for something. It was still someone not-him inside his head, but he had gotten used to the press of thousands of minds. Just one extra nearly fit.

In fact, Rey felt distinctly less comfortable than he was. _This is… um._

DJ smiled. _That bad, huh?_

_You are missing part of your consciousness._

DJ felt his smile drop off. _That… okay._

_I think that’s why you have so much trouble filtering. Your mind is constantly trying to fix itself, but it doesn’t actually know what it’s looking for because you never had what’s missing, so you just get… noise._

DJ sighed. _So Ren was right, then._

 _Ren couldn’t fix this because I don’t think he has what you’re missing either._ Rey bit her lower lip determinedly. _I do, though. I can do this._ She sounded a bit like she was trying to convince herself, but DJ wasn’t about to call her on it.

The pressure on DJ’s temples strengthened. _Just a warning: this might feel weird._

 _What is-_ DJ didn’t get any further than that before Rey exploded in light.

\--*--

 _Sorry_ , said Rey about five seconds later.

 _It’s fine_ , said DJ. _My eyesight should be back in just a couple of minutes._

 _Not that,_ said Rey. She then flicked at one of the threads running between them, and it was only then that DJ realized that it was _anchored_ to something in his head.

She then leaned forward and looked over him critically, while DJ didn’t feel equipped to do much more than sit there and blink. The new… _thing_ didn’t hurt, exactly, it just felt really alien. _What did you just do?_

 _I’ve patched over the hole in your consciousness with mine_ , said Rey. _I think once you have the shape of it, you’ll be able to hold it on your own, but that’ll take a day or two. Until then I’ll be in there, so- sorry._ “But in the meantime,” said Rey, out loud, “I can teach you how to shield. It’ll be a while before you can block someone actively trying to get into your head, but at least you’ll be able to hide. And after that, there would be nothing stopping you from walking out of here.” DJ didn’t bother pointing out he was locked up in a Resistance cell. Both of them knew that wouldn’t keep him if he really wanted to leave. “I broke the Force link between you and Ren, and the one between us will be gone soon, so. Neither Kylo Ren nor I would ever be able to find you.

“Or you could stay.”

“A-and I’m sure the Resistance would w-welcome me with open arms,” said DJ, still feeling around the new thing in his head. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but- better than anything that had gone in there before. Something, with time, he could maybe get used to.

“Finn no longer wants to shoot you,” said Rey. “Anything better than that you have to earn.”

\--*--

Rey taught him how to shield. The channel between them faded after a few days, as promised.

DJ stayed.

\--*--

The eldest of Rey’s kids was from Canto Bight, a racetrack falthier jockey who’d figured out telekinesis on his own time and used it to escape with his fellow (non-Force sensitive) jockeys, their falthiers, and a ten million credit pleasure cruiser they’d stolen from the casino that’d owned them.

The two younger kids were a pair of twins who had tried to pickpocket Rey when she’d been visiting Coronet City on Corellia for a mission for the Resistance, which meant that the founders of the new Jedi Order were five for five on gutter trash.

It also meant that DJ and Rey were the only ones in the group who were literate, and neither of them was well equipped to parse through the Jedi texts Rey admitted without guilt to have stolen from Luke Skywalker.

“I learned my letters off a T-16 Skyhopper operator’s manual,” said Rey despairingly, flipping through the thickest of the books for what she claimed was her fifth attempt.

“Fashion magazines,” said DJ. “O-one of my mum’s friends liked to read them aloud.” It was still startlingly easy for them to talk telepathically, which was why both of them tried not to. They had both seen too much of each other, especially during those first few days, and DJ at least was trying to reacclimatize himself to the idea that he could have some privacy in his own head. The illusion of a little bit of distance helped both of them sleep at night.

They were holed up in Rey’s room, for lack of somewhere more private. The three kids were on the other side of the base in the impromptu falthier stable while oldest kid—Noel—tried to convince the younger two that falthiers were the best thing in the universe and weren’t actually going to kick them. Acen and Lainan, who had grown up in a city slum chasing eskrats away from their food, had not yet been convinced, but Noel was persistent, and Rey had encouraged it.

“They need to learn to trust each other,” explained Rey. “And I need to understand what the hell this says so I can explain it to them.”

DJ looked over her shoulder at the place on the page her finger was tracing. “… Nexu aren’t p-pack hunters. This metaphor m-makes no sense.”

Rey nodded miserably. “And I think the previous line is a poetry quote, but it doesn’t say _what_ poem, so I have to guess what the reference is supposed to mean in the context of…” Rey squinted down at the page. “I think it’s trying to explain a Force technique called Malacia?”

“That isn’t even B-basic,” said DJ.

“It… _might_ have been, when the book was written nine hundred years ago,” said Rey.

DJ fell back across the bed and closed his eyes. The room wasn’t well-lit, and he could only stare at yellowed pages covered in faded scrawl for so long before his eyes started to hurt. “W-we could burn them.”

“These books are valuable artifacts of the Jedi Order,” said Rey, still managing to sound extremely tempted.

“The J-Jedi Order that kidnapped l-little kids and taught them f-feelings were bad?” said DJ. “Th-that Order?”

“So we may end up burning them once I’ve extracted out all of the good bits,” said Rey. “But that’s a ways off. The book written by Barsen’thor actually talks about how you can _heal_ with the Force.” She gave him a significant look.

“Did it teach you how?” asked DJ.

“No,” said Rey. “But just the fact that it’s _possible_ was how I knew I could fix _you_.”

“Is there anything the Force c-can’t do?” asked DJ.

“I don’t know,” said Rey.

“D-doesn’t that freak you out?” asked DJ.

“Yes,” said Rey, propping her chin up on her knees. “I want to know what I’m capable of.”

“Th-that’s not what I meant,” said DJ. “I mean, baseline, we know that the Force allows you to r-read people’s minds, control them. Wh-what determines who gets to do that?”

Rey thought about it. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I thought it was needs must, once, but that doesn’t explain…” she trailed off.

“Me,” said DJ. “Or Kylo Ren. Unless what the Force _needs_ is something w-we don’t understand.”

Rey stared down at him. “You talk like it’s a person.”

“Kylo Ren th-thought so,” said DJ. “That it wants things, controls outcomes, and only trained Force users c-can resist it enough to have free will.”

“That explains a lot,” said Rey. “About him, I mean.”

“I d-do kind of feel bad for him,” DJ said.

“Why?” asked Rey. “By his own ethos, he has free will. So he’s made his own choices. They’re terrible, but they’re definitely his.”

“I d-dunno,” said DJ. “I guess because I was in his head so long. He was so c-convinced he was right, but he was still so _unhappy_.”

“Was this before or after he tortured you?” said Rey.

DJ shrugged, a little helplessly. “Kind of… during?”

“I felt bad for him once,” said Rey. “For a few days. He’s been through some stuff. Except then I remembered that many people have been through worse, and they don’t turn into murderous tyrants. These days, I save my sympathy for those he’s hurt.”

DJ grinned up at her. “Like me?”

“Well, no, not you,” said Rey. “You’re an asshole.”

But she was leaning back against his legs as she said it, so that was alright.

\--*--

“Does Rey know you’re smoking those?” said Finn.

“You r-really come here to ask me that?” asked DJ. He was quite comfortably sprawled out on the top of the nearest hill overlooking the Resistance base, Roundy burbling a low hum of droid gossip next to him. When also taking into consideration that the stray pittin who had made the base her territory had finally warmed up to him and was currently sleeping in his lap, it was very nearly a perfect morning.

Not quite perfect, because Rey was off on a mission for the Resistance and the three kids were holed up inside the base getting taught their letters by some X-Wing pilot who used to be a schoolteacher, but the quiet was kind of nice too.

He didn’t appreciate Finn’s interruption, he guessed was his point.

Or his moralizing. “Those’ll kill you,” said Finn.

“Sure,” said DJ, taking another drag off his death stick. He probably ruined his drawl by then coughing into his sleeve—he did _not_ remember death sticks being this harsh—but he still managed to take another drag while pointedly meeting Finn’s gaze.

Finn just rolled his eyes. “Never mind, I just remembered I don’t care. Anyway, Poe says it’s finally time for you to earn your keep. We think that the First Order has broken through our remote network security; they’ve nearly caught two squads on scouting missions when there wasn’t any chance of a leak.”

“So?” said DJ.

“Poe wants you to rewrite our comm encryption,” said Finn.

“N-not my specialty,” said DJ.

“You’re literally the only slicer we have,” said Finn.

DJ abruptly found himself breathing in wrong halfway through another drag of his death stick, and it was nearly twenty seconds this time before he finally managed to stop coughing, Finn standing impatiently off to the side. “You- wh-what, really?”

“Why would I lie about that?” said Finn.

DJ mentally ran through the implications of the fact that he had been living for two weeks in a place that used base-level encryption protocols. He then turned to Roundy. “H-how the hell have you been allowing this?”

Roundy whirred indignantly.

“I d-don’t care if you aren’t specced for ciphering, you could’ve at least t-t-told your Poe to hire someone-”

Roundy stared at him expectantly.

“… S-so you suggested me. Right.” DJ sighed and stubbed out his death stick onto the hillside. “Dammit.”

He carefully maneuvered the pittin to his shoulder—she meowed once in protest before falling immediately back asleep—before pushing himself gracelessly to his feet and turning to Finn. “So… where’s your comm room?”

\--*--

The glares he got while they walked through the halls of the Resistance base were kind of sporadic. Everyone knew what he’d done before Crait, but Roundy had informed him that Poe talked a lot about what had happened on the _Finalizer_ , too, and the members of the Resistance not only universally beloved Commander Poe Dameron but were apparently suckers for a redemption story, so. No one had tried to kill DJ yet, at least, and Rose had only tazed him the once when they accidentally ran into each other in a supply closet during DJ’s first week on the base.

The comm room was, as predicted, full of depressingly outdated tech, which. Didn’t make coding decent encryption protocols _impossible_ , just difficult. And irritating. And slow.

DJ seated himself at the nearest terminal and turned it on.

“The password is-” began Finn.

“Uh-huh,” said DJ, and typed in a code string. The terminal beeped once, then _Welcome Administrator_ flashed across the screen.

“Man, you are such an asshole,” said Finn, though not as angrily as he might have just a few weeks ago.

DJ, meanwhile, was resisting the urge to bury his face in his hands. The pittin was still asleep on his shoulder, and she had a tendency to scratch when jostled. “You guys are still using _factory default settings_.”

“I get it, our security sucks,” said Finn. “Is this going to take long to fix?”

DJ flipped to the base code and quickly scanned it. It wasn’t pretty, because it was _literally_ the factory defaults and Constant Industries went cheap on its basic security package. “You have a year?” asked DJ.

“No,” said Finn.

“Then you’re n-not getting something built from scratch,” said DJ, and turned on the holonet connection before linking up to one of his deep net data repositories. He’d built a security system for an old rich guy with a dreadnought about ten years back that had gone unused when the dreadnought had been blown up by a rival; considering the Resistance tech was about ten years out of date, it should be able to run those encryption protocols once he modified it a bit for the OS and compressed down some updated code algorithms-

Finn hadn’t left. “Why are you still here?” asked DJ. “Even this is going to t-take me a couple of days.” Downloading the system code alone would take a few hours, considering the processor speed of the Resistance network. He’d planned to go take a nap before meeting up with the kids for lunch in the meantime, except Finn was still standing in the doorway, staring at him.

“I wanted to ask you,” said Finn. “Why are _you_ still here? You don’t care about the fight between the Resistance and the First Order.”

“Same reason as you,” said DJ.

Finn stood up straight. “What does that mean? _I_ care-”

“Maybe you do now,” said DJ, “but you sure as shit d-didn’t when you started.”

“You have a really bad habit of interrupting people,” said Finn.

“Sorry,” said DJ, who wasn’t really.

“… I joined to save Rey,” said Finn. “She can save herself, now.”

“F-from what I heard, she could save herself _then_ ,” said DJ. “B-but you get my point. Everyone joins a cause for the same reason: to help someone they care about.”

“So, what,” said Finn, “Rey’s the first person you’ve ever cared about?” He sounded like he thought he should be derisive, but couldn’t quite put in the conviction for his tone to hit the mark.

“No,” said DJ. “She’s just the first person I knew I c-could help.”

“You could’ve helped me and Rose on the _Supremacy_!” said Finn, by his flinch a little louder than he meant to. He glanced out into the hallway through the door before shutting it behind him, leaving him and DJ alone in the comm room. If it had been anyone else, DJ might have been a little worried, but even though Finn had some anger in him, he wasn’t a violent person by nature, so DJ didn’t bother standing up from his chair when Finn took a step closer to him before stopping, hands balled into fists at his sides. “You left us to die.”

“Yeah,” said DJ.

“But you saved us first on Canto Bight,” said Finn, half to himself, before looking up at DJ again. “And then you helped me and Poe escape on the _Finalizer_. What the hell is your game?”

DJ was really wishing Lainan hadn’t stolen his lighter at breakfast; he didn’t deal well with emotional conversations at the best of times, and having nothing to do with his hands wasn’t helping things. “You w-wouldn’t have listened,” said DJ. “On the _Supremacy_. There wasn’t anything I c-c-could do.”

“You _knew_ we were going to get ambushed?” said Finn. Then his eyes narrowed. “You said before that you didn’t have the Force then!”

“I d-didn’t _know_ I did,” said DJ. “B-but something felt wrong when we got to that ship.”

“You should have said something,” said Finn.

“As I said,” said DJ. “You wouldn’t have listened.”

“You should have said something _anyway_!” shouted Finn. “You couldn’t have _known_ that-”

“You think I hadn’t tried before?” said DJ. He still hadn’t stood up, but he felt his hands clenching on the chair’s armrests anyway. “People _never_ listen. It was only when p-people found out I’m apparently f-f-fucking _magic_ that suddenly I’m worth paying attention to. So no; I said nothing. And I saved myself, because it isn’t worth t-trying for anyone else when all they do is ignore you and then _die_.”

“Over two hundred people died on those shuttles that Hux blew up!” said Finn.

“And over five hundred _thousand_ died when your Admiral Holdo rammed the _Supremacy_ ,” said DJ. “You think those lives were worth less? I’d known you and Rose for _fourteen hours_ when we g-got caught. It was all the fucking same to me; soldiers in a war, throwing yourselves away for nothing. That’s still how it is. I don’t believe in your cause. I haven’t joined _you_. I’ve joined _Rey_.”

“She’s a member of the Resistance too,” said Finn.

“Yeah,” said DJ, “But she’s the first person I’ve met to see the wheel for w-what it is and have the capacity to stop it.”

“... Fuck,” said Finn. “We _are_ the same.” He sounded depressed by this.

“Sorry,” said DJ, who still wasn't.

Finn barked a short laugh and ran a hand over his face. “It’s just… Poe told me something, right after Crait. ‘Hope is like the sun. If you only believe it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night.’

“I told Poe he was full of shit. The problem for most people isn’t that they stop believing in the sun after it sets; their problem is that they’ve never seen it at all, and people can’t believe in something they never knew existed.” He looked at DJ.

“… Okay,” said DJ.

“Rey’s the sun in this metaphor, in case you were wondering,” said Finn.

“I wasn’t,” said DJ.

“You are the most punchable person I’ve ever met,” said Finn, sounding impossibly cheered by this.

“Thanks,” said DJ.

“I’m glad we understand each other,” said Finn, patting DJ on the shoulder opposite the pittin. Then he left.

For the first time, DJ regretted his promise to himself to try and give people their privacy (now that he could), because if anything he now understood Finn less than he had ten minutes ago. “… What the hell was that.”

\--*--

“DJ!” Noel shouted across the table at him in the cafeteria.

It took actual effort not to start; before coming to the Resistance base, no one had said his name out loud in _years_ , and it still sent a small jolt of panic through him every time someone did. People knowing your name meant they knew who you were, which was the opposite of what DJ wanted most of the time. Rey knew this and never said his name at all, but the three kids were blissfully unaware of the blasted wasteland that was DJ’s head and so said it every time he entered the room or whenever else they wanted his attention.

He was almost used to it now. _Almost_ being the operative word. “Yeah, kid?”

“I found a cool thing in one of Rey’s books,” said Noel, said book sitting in front of him on the table. For all of Rey’s talk about the books being valuable artifacts of the Jedi Order, she didn’t stop DJ or any of the kids from borrowing them and taking them wherever, even when wherever was less than ten centimeters from a pool of syrup where the twins were feeding each other sweetcakes. Even now, sitting next to DJ and inhaling her third bowl of soup for the evening, she just smiled at Noel and gave him a thumb’s up. Noel returned it before turning back to DJ.

“The last chapter of _The Ballad of Nomi Sunrider_ ,” Noel said. “I think you should read it. It’s about the stuff you’re good at.”

“Slicing?” said DJ.

Noel laughed. He was a happy kid, considering. “Nooo! The Force stuff!” He shoved the book across the table at DJ, narrowly missing Acen and Lainan’s syrup pool.

DJ caught it before it fell off the table and obligingly flipped to the last chapter. The book in question was the oldest Rey had, and it was a reprinting at that, about a Jedi Master who lived some four thousand years back. It was also Rey’s favorite, if only because it spoke about Jedi having things like ‘emotions’ and ‘children’ like they weren’t heretical.

However, it was still the oldest of Rey’s books, which meant the Basic was nearly unreadable. Neither Rey nor DJ had ever gotten much beyond the second chapter, which was in of itself an accomplishment considering the prologue alone ran over fifty pages. Just looking at the text gave DJ a bit of a headache. The fact that Noel had made it to the last chapter was, well. “You g-got through all of this?”

“No,” said Noel cheerily. “I read the bits around the pictures.” He leaned across the table and flipped the book a few pages forward, then pointed. “See? It’s like how you describe the Force.”

DJ looked. The drawing was not one he’d seen before, though the person at the center of it was familiar. Nomi Sunrider was not a striking woman, except for the blue eyes. And the fact that in the drawing she was sitting in the middle of a spider’s web, the silk radiating out from her to catch what seemed to be hundreds of starships in its net.

“… Huh,” said DJ.

Next to him, Rey also leaned over to look at the picture before flipping back to the beginning of the chapter. “Battle meditation,” she pronounced carefully.

At that, DJ had to laugh, causing both Noel and Rey to look at him. “S-sorry, kid,” he said to Noel. “Anything with the word ‘battle’ in it p-probably isn’t up my alley.”

Noel frowned mulishly. Rey said nothing, though her eyes went back to the page, skimming it silently before looking again at DJ. “I don’t know, I think Noel might be on to something.”

“What?” said DJ. “No.”

“Not for battle,” said Rey. “You’re right about that. But Noel’s right too; you would be good at this.” When he didn’t respond immediately, Rey just held out the book to him. “Ignoring the past is how people always end up repeating it. It’s about extracting out the good bits, remember? And making something new.”

Making something new.

Well, that was why he’d stayed, after all.

“T-twist my arm, why don’t you,” he said to Noel, and took the book.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I 100% stole the name of the racetrack falthier jockey with Force powers from peradi's Force-sensitive DJ fics. Also it seems to be becoming a running pattern that I complete a novella on February 11th about a Star Wars character that most people don't care about. We can take bets about who it'll be next year. I'm guessing the villain from the Han Solo film, he looked cool in the trailer.

**Author's Note:**

> This was 100% inspired by peradi's fics about Force-sensitive DJ, though it goes in a different direction.


End file.
